TQ Reviews

Editor’s Note

by Kristina Marie Darling

I’m thrilled to introduce three new additions to the Reviews Page at Tupelo Quarterly. First, Diego Baez has contributed an incisive piece on Alejandra Pizarnik’s The Most Foreign Country. Baez offers a beautifully rendered discussion of an accomplished book, as well as a poignant meditation on collective grieving, cultural memory, and the nature of artistic community. Additionally, Jessica Cuello has written a lyric appreciation of Jenny George’s The Dream of Reason, using this gorgeous volume of poems as a point of entry to larger questions about language, identity, and inner experience. Lastly, John Bonnani engages Chase Berggrun’s R E D in prose as vibrant as the book itself.

In the coming months, look for more review-essays, as well as small press features and discussions of new poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and hybrid texts. Our Senior Reviews Editor, Emari DiGiorgio, will also be assigning a selection of books, bringing an even greater diversity of perspectives to Tupelo Quarterly’s offerings in literary criticism. In the meantime, enjoy!

January 2019

by Diego Báez

It’s possible to read Alejandra Pizarnik’s debut collection of poetry as a kind of midlife crisis. Published in 1955, when the poet was only 19 years old, La tierra más ajena, translated masterfully by Yvette Siegert into The Most Foreign Country, with its tiny cataclysms and brooding flashes of brilliance, proved to be only the first twinkling of the artistic genius that tirelessly possessed and, ultimately, consumed the young poet. Over the unfortunately short second half of her life, Pizarnik began and abandoned coursework at the Universidad de Buenos Aires, relocated to Paris and studied at the Sorbonne, published criticism and translations, won a Guggenheim fellowship, received a Fulbright scholarship, and authored another seven books of poetry. Then, on a Monday in September 1972, under the equilibrating sign of Libra, Pizarnik overdosed on barbiturates and ended her life at the age of 36. Read more >>

by John Bonanni

David Shields, in his seminal text, Reality Hunger, argues that contemporary literature has not kept up with contemporary art in terms of depth. Despite art’s ability to transcend image and space, to work duality of images and meaning, we, the literati, are still policed by comfortable tendencies toward text production and authorship. At least that’s what I remember about it. After I finished reading the book, I took on wild projects like collaging the DSM-IV, with little success, and later, coming to the realization that it’s just really, really hard to construct projects involving meta-text—which is likely why it hasn’t been fully embraced by the literary community. In her debut full-length book of poetry, Chase Berggrun has proved me wrong—her recent book, R E D, is a book-long erasure poem of the Bram Stoker’s Dracula (bold that r in Bram, the e in Stoker, and the D in Dracula). Read more >>

by Jessica Cuello

Jenny George’s The Dream of Reason reminds us of the liminal nature of existence; the poems exist on a threshold between states of being and move quietly between worlds. George’s book takes its title from the Goya sketch “El sueno de la razon produce monstruos.” In Spanish “el sueno” means sleep, but also dream, and in Goya’s sketch, a man sits asleep at a table while we witness his dreams: fabulist animals that appear behind him. The Dream of Reason moves between life and death, sleep and wakefulness, night and day, winter and spring, but the poems do not merely capture states of transition; they also imply an overlapping, shared existence between all things. It is here, in the overlapping identities, that the poems have the most at stake. Read more >>

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December 2018

by Amy Beeder

Heather June Gibbons’ debut collection is the literary equivalent of a carnival ride: it jolts, thrills, dizzies: you’ll step off windblown, with a little midway grit in your eye. The voice here feels relentlessly hectic, overwhelmed, a caffeinated oracle taking in and reporting on the signs and wonders of contemporary existence. Perception becomes compulsion: in “Smell the Moxie,” for instance, the speaker confesses that “left/to my own devices. I play until they break/I keep turning this roll of invisible tape/hoping to catch an edge.” Nothing seen or said is static, since these poems often revise or second-guess their own perceptions. Read more >>

by Leslie Adrienne Miller

Melissa Stein’s title, Terrible Blooms, is good on its promise to weld the grotesque and the lovely so tightly and repeatedly that they transcend simple paradox and make of pain a single luminous skein. The poem “blessings,” for example, takes the form of a prayer comprised of repeated “may you . . .” clauses wherein each expectation of a “blessing” resolves in an image more suited to curse. The largely pastoral images are so sharp and visceral, they often hurt: “may barbed wire tear off/ the snouts of your pigs.” The clauses are packed into a column with justified right and left margins, a formality that contrasts sharply with the fluid lyric’s songlike surfaces: “may the milliner/ embroider your bonnet with/ nettles the blackberry fell your/ dog.” While the poem largely wishes revenge on an addressee, by the end, the addressee also seems to be the self: “may the wolf/ carry off the heart of your heart/ and the swans swim thrice by/ your grief.” Form and meaning contradict each other to pressure this pain into something magical, if not exactly hopeful. Read more >>

by Michele Sharpe

Anna Lena Phillips Bell’s skilled employment of repetition, which is the foundation of all poetic forms, creates a sometimes subtle, sometimes gaudy beauty in her debut collection, Ornament, winner of the 2016 Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry. Whether the poems’ occasions are a lace pattern, a garden, a melody, or a song’s refrain, repetition ornaments them with both sonic and thematic resonance, leading the reader into a series of iterations and reiterations of meaning. The book’s title, which can be read as either noun or verb, strikes an immediately ironic tone, since “ornament” in our patriarchal culture often connotes femininity and the non-essential. Centering domesticity in poetry continues as a remarkable matter, and these poems, like those of Dickinson, offer close examination of the artifacts of the home while demonstrating, with vigor and clarity, just how essential – and feminine – the act of ornamenting is to human culture and to human spirituality. Read more >>

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November 2018

by Jessica Cuello

In Doe Parker’s The Good House & The Bad House, the reader enters a dreamlike past via the memory of a childhood home. Parker depicts a cohesive world that, while dreamlike, presents the vivid reality of his childhood. These poems tap the elusive nature of memory in order to locate the self in the geography of the past. As if the book is a single poem that acts as the recreated house, it has no page numbers, nor is it composed of a series of titled poems. The traditional markers of page numbers and poem titles are abandoned, and the effect is one of intentional dislocation. Additionally, interspersed throughout the book are floor plan sketches of the different rooms; it’s as if we are literally moving through the house itself. These floor plans only indicate objects: furniture, windows, tiles, wallpaper, but they include small hand-written details like the “purple & white tapestry mom wove of a hand holding a match.” The absence of people in the drawings creates the sensation of looking back in time, yet we are aware that the house is, and was, lived in. It is humanized by “dusty lipstick containers” and “a bookshelf full of yarn.” These maps underscore the narrator’s need to locate the self in the past. They also convey how hard it is to retrieve memory; it’s “like the animal in the corner of the claw crane game that [they] can’t get [their] hand around.” Read more >>

by Joseph Harrington

Procedural poetry + music: this combination might put you in mind of John Cage. And Geoffrey Gatza’s fascinating new book is definitely in the tradition of Cage, Jackson MacLow, or Jean Lescure. But there’s a twist: these procedural poems are based on a form of traditional church-bell ringing – namely, “change ringing,” a practice which dates to the early 17th century in Britain. Read more >>

by Dora Malech

The title page layout of Angela Veronica Wong’s Elsa: An Unauthorized Autobiography breaks its subtitle down the right-hand margin: “an un- / authorized auto- / biography,” an apt design move to introduce a project that fragments the self across time and space. The speaker’s I is and is not a manifestation of Elsa herself, aligned but separate; Elsa is, indeed, rendered an un- (a non-entity, a less-than) by the systemic powers-that-be; and the repetition of poetic form becomes the driving force that writes (author-izes) an embodied text into being. Formally, Elsa is a book-length sequence of sonnets. Haunted by glimpses of pentameter and rhyme but ultimately unfettered by those constraints, those who look to traditional prosody as a litmus test of entry into a particular formal tradition might deem these shadow sonnets or quatorzains, not sonnets proper, but these questions of propriety and entry into an exclusive echelon of tradition read as intentional features of Wong’s system, not bugs. What is a sonnet, the collection asks? What is an Elsa, for that matter? Here, both seem to exist as things made, things done to, creatures of context and circumstance, experiments tried again and again. Read more >>

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October 2018

by Joey Lew

There is something gritty that catches in your teeth when you read Akbar’s work, sharp-edged words that when linked together suddenly slip off your tongue. His poems are ordered streams of chaos; they try to contain innumerable ideas but are reined in by uniform lines and in-line rhyme. “Exciting the Canvas,” for instance, touches on life’s greater questions (“Is that / why I’m here? Everyone / needs kudos, from newborns / to saviors”), the essence of suffering (“performed pain is still pain”), the end of the world (“outside—sweeping plains / of green flora and service stations. / Odd, for an apocalypse / to present itself with such bounty.”), and the necessity of naming (“Because I am here / each of these things has a name”), but does not answer any of them, instead pushing readers to contemplate their own struggles with larger truths. The magic is in how he ties these impossibly large ideas into a coherent, navigable whole. Read more >>

by Dara Elerath

These days we often read the news to find out what is important and worth devoting our time and attention to. Serious moral, ethical and life-defining dilemmas arise and must be given due consideration; however, in spite of this, our daily lives with their private ecstasies and agonies continue, and while they may be of less historical significance in relation to larger, world issues, the moments that occur in these smaller hours are of equal importance to our emotional, spiritual and intellectual selves. In the four books of prose poetry by Uruguayan writer Marosa di Giorgio that are gathered in I Remember Nightfall (translated by Jennine Marie Pitas), we are able to glimpse the surreal, violent, magical, lush and abundant world of a woman’s inner life—the life she accrued and contemplated in these private hours. Though Uruguay’s military dictatorships formed the backdrop of her life and though she subtly engages with the political issues of her time, she is never overt. Her poems focus instead on expressing the refracted dream logic of her inner experience and imagination as she navigates through the memories, bonds of relationship, joys, pains and traumas that form her existence. di Giorgio grew up on a family farm outside Salto, Uruguay; this farm provides the imaginative locus of the poems, though it is not depicted as it was, but as di Giorgio saw it—riddled with miniature angels, flying hares, cigarette-smoking bats, lethal flowers, animate mushrooms, rubies, dwarfs, potatoes, and snails that resemble pearly yo-yos. Read more >>

by Meiko Ko

Beatrice is a book about death, life, aging, loneliness. A learning to live again after a spouse died—is it to find a new love interest, a guide out of grief, or to deal with it in solitude. For this, reviewers have compared the protagonist of the novella, Beatrice Hagen, to the most famous in literature, Beatrice Portinari—the woman whom Dante has only met twice but has inspired The New Life and The Divine Comedy. She has guided him through purgatory and heaven, and likewise, Beatrice Hagen might lead Philip Seidel, a retiring professor and writer, out of his mourning for his wife—an afterlife, for the one still living. Stephen Dixon is a prolific writer of thirty-four books, twice nominee for the National Book Awards (Frog, ’91, Interstate, ’95), among other fellowships and prizes. Read more >>

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September 2018

by Joey Lew

A metaphor that extends across a poem, defying clichés and breaches of clarity or cohesion, is already a feat to be admired. Rajiv Mohabir sees this challenge and raises it 98 pages, pushing a metaphor and its accompanying string of associative leaps to form the rock upon which The Taxidermist’s Cut, his debut collection, is built. Via instructions on how to prepare a carcass for taxidermy, presented as a series of erasure poems from a variety of taxidermy texts, the speaker crafts himself coyote and puts himself on the steel table, a scalpel in America’s hand. “Lets pretend you are going hunting,” the preface begins, “The copper of pine needles falls; / whether you catch me or not is not the point.” We come to hunt the speaker as the preface would suggest, catching him in his cadence, ready to accept pieces of him even in the rhythm of his breath. From a continuity in cadence and linearity of story, if not within a poem, then across poems, we come to see that the poems share a speaker, and that this is the story of his life. Read more >>

by Shannon Nakai

Jenny Xie’s second poetry collection, Eye Level, reveals the prowess of a new contemporary literary great. The title theme weaves a cohesive fabric of perception—the physical, metaphysical, and cultural act of seeing and being seen—among a rich array of topics ranging from solitude to heritage, migration to land and (dis)placement. Each poem explores the tension between active agency and vacancy, language and the lack thereof, and attempts to establish bridges and distance simultaneously. From Eve, the world’s first migrant, to the speaker herself, Xie’s characters make sense of a world of contradiction, locating its patterns, as even “suffering operates by its own logic” (“Zuihitsu”). The speaker is both enjoined in the common fabric of humanity and its shared experiences and distanced by her position as the observer, the eye that witnesses and records, but ultimately even her solitude is reconciled; while in isolation, her poems embrace the truth that loneliness is universal. Read more >>

by Anu Mahadev

What is home? Is it a place, a person, a feeling, a sense of belonging? Or all of these? Or none perhaps. Home–its absence, its overwhelming presence–is the central theme in Meena Alexander’s Atmospheric Embroidery, a collection that surrounds the reader with its constant sense of displacement, an evolving journey from one home to another. There is loss, there is joy, but there is also a gnawing feeling of discontent, in poem after poem, where the speaker is always observing, at times with fear, at times with resignation. One has the sense that there is a hovering cloud wherein the speaker feels she cannot change the events around her, she can only adjust to them and decide what her reaction to them will be. Read more >>

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August 2018

by Joey Lew

If you read Kristin Robertson’s debut book once, you really ought to read it again. In the very last poem, one finds oneself circling back to the beginning with a newfound understanding of Robertson’s self-awareness. By trafficking in sarcasm and irony, she reveals that throughout the sincerity and imagination of earlier pieces she has always known that the theme inescapably interacts with a trope: man as angel. As much as she defamiliarizes her subject, she cannot escape the association, until she finally acknowledges it; “Will Humans Ever Have Wings,” the last poem’s title asks, to which Yahoo Answers responds “that will probably NEVER happen. / Evolution produces only what is NECESSARY, / not what is cool.” Robertson’s willingness to engage in a found poem that treats her book’s premise as a ridiculous afterthought lightens the tone but also encourages a fresh understanding of her work. She is tempting us to question her, a fun and rewarding challenge on second read. This is not to say that there isn’t plenty to reckon with the first time through. Read more >>

Towards the end of her debut book, Some Beheadings, Aditi Machado’s speaker in “Prospect” ponders their ontological nature: “…I think/I’m not human, I’m grammarian.” It is not a surprising thought by that point in the collection. Machado consistently interrogates how grammar, diction, and syntax all constitute personhood or being. She does this by relentlessly destabilizing traditional grammar throughout Some Beheadings. Poems contain constant references to the “textual” nature of everyday objects and experiences, an awareness that recognizes both the expansiveness and the restrictions of language and words. As the poetry editor of Asymptote, a journal of translation, and as a translator in her own right, one gets the feeling that Machado is more sensitive to these notions than most. Read more >>

by Reagan Upshaw

Christopher Isherwood once paid tribute to the technical facility of his friend W.H. Auden, a facility evident even when Auden was at university: “You could say to him: ‘Please write me a double ballade on the virtues of a certain brand of toothpaste, which also contains at least ten anagrams on the names of well-known politicians, and of which the refrain is to be as follows . . .’ Within twenty-four hours, your ballade would be ready – and it would be good.” I don’t know that Maryann Corbett has ever been issued a similar challenge, but I have no doubt she could pull it off. Street View, Corbett’s fourth book of poetry, contains well-turned examples of enough forms – sonnets, triolets, heroic couplets, bout-rimés, and Old English alliterative verse, among others – that it could easily stand as a textbook of style for budding poets. Read more >>

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July 2018

by Erin Adair-Hodges

It’s inevitable that social media’s ubiquitous presence in most of our lives has changed not just the way we interact with and see each other but the way we read as well; we read to seek out a fuller understanding of ourselves and others, and social media fulfills this need, but in bursts and often without context—the windows without the house. Much of social media focuses on references to action rather than becoming action—we see this in the rise of Instapoetry, which relies heavily on abstractions, as if the less said, the more of our own meaning we can pour in. None of this is to indict either social media or how some are using it to create and promote a new strain of writing, but it does help us see Heather Derr-Smith’s newest collection, Thrust, as a kind of antidote to the abstract. Through its poems concerning the intersection of violence, sex, and place, Thrust is a collection that verbs. Read more >>

by Wesley Sexton

Tarfia Faizullah’s new collection of poems, Registers of Illuminated Villages, engages with issues of grief, trauma, ancestry, and joy in a voice that is always attentive and intensely lyric. Faizullah untangles matters of societal and ancestral influence; she catalogs the ways we hurt and affirm each other; and she answers each question with the utmost lyricism, as if song itself is the suitable answer to hard-to-answer questions. Registers of Illuminated Villages continues work begun in Faizullah’s first collection, Seam, in that both books dig into an existential tension presented by large-scale global injustice. Is it possible to fully acknowledge the pains of this world – to listen to grieving voices – and not be irrevocably torn by them? What does it mean to desire a life in this world, knowing the dangerous and terrible ways human life has enacted change in this world? Read more >>

By Shannon Nakai

In Oceanic, her fourth collection of poetry, Aimee Nezhukumatathil writes a series of love letters to the world and its inhabitants. From intimate psalms of love to her husband—whose love wields electricity as they ascend the Swiss Alps—to poems addressed to starfish, turtles, and the Northern Lights, the “you” in each poem is as fluid and varied as the structures she uses to encapsulate all subjects. The tender, introspective “Self-Portrait as Scallop” and “The Two Times I Loved You on a Farm” carry the eye in a wavelike rhythm with lines spaced elegantly across the landscape of the page, while poems like “Upon Hearing the News You Buried Our Dog” showcase her adroitly crafted couplets. Marine biology, feathers, flight, passion—these thread her poems in a cohesive arc firmly planting the speaker in a world that demands unflinching attention. With her signature language whose register is both lyric and conversational, sonic lines rich with seamless pairings of sound and dynamic imagery, in bold and yet vulnerable sincerity she observes and ponders the marriage of science and love—the double star Albireo whose blue and gold entities melding into one she refashions into the oneness of romance, or the “underwater volcanoes” and “pillow lava” that give a night of passion a geography, a second physicality. Touching upon familiar themes of identity and placement that recall her earlier works, Nezhukumatathil invites the world to see “the dark sky as oceanic, boundless, limitless— ... / Let’s listen / how this planet hums with so much wing, fur, and fin.” Read more >>

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June 2018

by Sam Leon

Li-Young Lee’s fifth collection, The Undressing, contains exploration of the human condition through the doors of interactions with lovers, family, and personal history. The humility with which Lee contemplates life on large and small scales is ever refreshing, a feat that Lee has mastered in his work over the years. In the forward to his debut collection, Rose, Gerald Stern, whom Lee studied with at the University of Pittsburgh, likened him to Theodore Roethke, John Keats, and Rainer Marie Rilke. When I began reading The Undressing, I was also reading some poems from Rainer Marie Rilke and had been hanging on a line from the Duino Elegies. The question Rilke posed was “Aren’t lovers always arriving at each other’s boundaries?” As I immersed myself in Lee’s poems, I found his work to be a natural continuation and answer to Rilke. Lee’s delightfully meditative poems are interested in boundaries we have in all of the different roles we inhabit, boundaries we encounter with friends, lovers, family, and self. Most importantly, these poems encourage thoughtful risk that guides toward knowing oneself and making the choice to expand beyond these boundaries, to become more intimate with life. Read more >>

by Emari DiGiorgio

Jane Satterfield’s Apocalypse Mix is a time capsule of the pre-Trump global political landscape that documents the ways in which the military-industrial complex has been normalized and stitched into the fabric of our lives. These poems trace the commodification of both war and its opposition, from the “renewable fashion for military chic” (8) to the inversion/perversion of punk anthems to department store Muzak, but they also examine how we sustain ourselves in the face of loss and conflict. The collection bristles with echoes of war-torn and protest verse, as numerous epigraphs from poets and songwriters frame each section with lyrics and lines against violence/war or in memory of those/all lost. Most striking is the first epigraph of the first section from The Clash’s “Hate and War”: “You have to deal with it.” Satterfield’s Apocalypse Mix witnesses the ways those on the front lines and those at home sustain themselves–sometimes through direct engagement, often through avoidance. Read more >>

by Anu Madahev

Words, waiting to be said, but never really crossing that confident chasm from thought to expression is what Sleepwalker essentially gravitates towards. Kami Westhoff’s debut collection is pregnant with the horror that contributes to the growth of something bestial, without it actually exploding all over the page. Which is not to say that it is hiding from reality – far from it, in fact. Akin to a page-turner, there is constant curiosity that accompanies the reader – what happens next and why –, rather than a comfortable settling in and tucking into the book. From the very first poem, “Early Warning,” there is a foreboding of the darkness that is to follow. The poet does not hesitate in introductions: everyone is already there, present in their involvement, without any major flourish announcing their arrivals – they are who they are, simple and twisted, their innate character on display right on the first page itself. We expect that the woman, the primary character, through whom we read these poems, slowly discovers what lies behind the screens, but we are mistaken.Read more >>

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May 2018

by Mark Hausmann

Sarah Rose Nordgren’s second book Darwin’s Mother, from the University of Pittsburg Press, borrows stories and voices from a wide range of scientific communities. Her book exemplifies contemporary poetry’s longstanding traditions of defamiliarizing human activities and imagining life beyond a human-centered world. In doing so, Nordgren delivers massively complex ideas in everyday language. She plays with persona to challenge the belief that humans are the supreme species. She questions science in a way that is weirdly warm and coldly humorous, often pointing to the beauty of raw data and a life beyond being too human. Altogether, Nordgren gives concise analogies that experiment with topics and issues of posthumanism. Read more >>

by Renee G. Rivers

If poetry makes inwardness palpable, Lois Roma-Deeley’s poetry collection, The Short List of Certainties makes belief and resilience in the face of the void attainable. In this collection housed in a trinity of three parts, poet Roma-Deeley looks into the great mystery and embraces the flux of the universe as her poems pendulum between pain and hope and uncertainty and certainty. Poems in Part I, fronted by St. Augustine and Pascal epigraphs on hope, courage and wagering, traverse themes of disaster, change, nothingness and ghosts, pointing to the human need for spiritual awareness that often begins in the mirror of nature. In Part II, poems suggest themes of transitions, turning points, and re-creation akin to St. Paul’s reawakening on the way to Damascus. Part III continues the trajectory in recognizing a divine presence from within, through poems infused with praise, elegy, dreams, and transcendence, culminating in the poem, “The Short List of Certainties.” Read more >>

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On The Quitters by Carlo Matos

by Marilynn Eguchi

Carlo Matos’ most recent book, The Quitters, is a collection of flash non-fiction pieces that goes beyond mere personal stories, though it contains evocative and accessible narratives that drive you into the realm of lived experiences. The book is filled with powerful moments, most no longer than a page, that come together to form nine chapters. “Dead Man’s Chest,” for example, dramatizes the author’s time as a cage fighter; “The Quitters” delves into the world of roller derby; “The Bull’s Eye” explores the appeal of bow and arrow, and “In the Hippo’s Mouth” draws charming and innocent comparisons between his father and the late, great Andre the Giant. In “Portuguese Paradise,” Matos attempts to come to terms with his Portuguese-American identity while “The Others” deals with the ironies and isolation of 90s pre-internet youth; “Smells Like Teen Spirit” revels in the ruckus and mob mentality of after-hours collegiate life; “Yankee Swap” mines the experience of the ever-present teacher crush, and, finally, “The Quitter is Illuminated” describes the daily struggles of a community college professor. Dealing always with the dueling themes of quitting and identity, Matos draws perimeters “on the lips of violence” that must “never cross the boundary” but allows us to discover the consequences of crossing that thin line or failing to. Read more >>

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April 2018

by Carson Welch

If nothing else will continue to burn in the minds of her readers, the final page of Kamila Shamsie’s eighth book, Home Fire, certainly will. The leaping novel, Shamsie’s contemporary take on Sophocles’ Antigone, replaces the titular heroine with Aneeka, a young and beautiful Muslim woman living in London. Shamsie’s rendition maintains Antigone’s conflict with her family and the state, which, by a sort of metonymy, implies larger contemporary connotations of conflicts between Muslim populations and the Western nations that target those populations. The buried body of Polynices in Antigone is exchanged for that of Aneeka’s twin brother, Parvaiz, who left for Raqqa to join the media wing of ISIS, influenced by the memory of their father, a jihadi who died under suspicious circumstances en route to Guantánamo. The twins’ older sister, Isma, who had raised them and had gone to America to resume her life in academia, remains a pragmatic figure, as the story’s Ismene—compliant, non-radical, and conscientious—who watches the drama unfold from America through Skype, news stories, and social media. Read more >>

by Mike Good

In Ruth Awad’s debut, Set to Music a Wildfire, the winner of the 2016 Michael Waters Poetry Prize, Awad undertakes the daunting task of imagining the world through her father’s eyes, often writing from his perspective and voicing his experience growing up during the Lebanese Civil War. The Lebanese Civil War lasted fifteen years, extending from 1975 to 1990 with Christians, Sunni Muslims, and Shia Muslims among other groups fighting for power. While the book is filled with emotional and physical trauma, I found comfort believing Set to Music a Wildfire can be read as an affirmation of bonds shared between a father and daughter, sisters, and family, as they endure. The first section, “Born into War,” focuses primarily on her father’s experiences during the war while the second and third section, “House Made of Breath” and “What the Living Know,” depict aftermath, memory, and life after immigration to the United States though poems affected by the war continue throughout the volume. Read more >>

by R.M. Haines

Michaels S. Judge’s The Scenarists of Europe is unlike any other book I’ve encountered. At novel-length (297 pp.), Scenarists—Judge’s third book—occupies a middle ground between the gnomic ...And Egypt Is the River (2013, Skylight Press; 114 pp.) and the behemoth that is Lyrics of the Crossing (Fugue State Press, 2014; 734 pp.). Each of these works of extravagant, lyrical fiction interrogates history, power, myth, and language, but Scenarists is unique in taking the legacy of Modernism as its focal point. The three main characters—Djuna, Tom, and Ezra—are radically mutated versions of Djuna Barnes, T.S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound, and allusions to the authors’ books and biographies are scattered throughout. However, in no way is this “historical fiction;” this is writing as both oracle and autopsy—a text at once violently disorienting and deeply revelatory. Read more >>

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March 2018

by Hala Alyan

To be a footnoter means paying attention, an exercise in authenticating and deciding what deserves further explanation. The speaker in Fady Joudah’s beautiful collection “Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance” (Milkweed Books, 2018) remarks, “I always hold back from writing in the margins of the clearest sentences,” implying that even the most transparent words can be cleaved from their intention. It is the (lonely) task of the artist to illuminate, and nowhere is illumination needed more than borderlands—of identity, of land, of emotion. “Footnotes” is ripe with such borderlands, just as it is ripe with delight and honesty and want. The poems, divided into three sections but all linked thematically by displacement, love and, yes, disappearance, are crackling, lyrical things, written with meticulous attention to imagery. In this way, Joudah is a loyal footnoter, keen to fashion a coherent narrative from kaleidoscopic histories and geographies, an unenviable task. “Sweet clot of wakefulness,” the speaker asks, “what is mercy?/To go mad among the mad/or go it alone.” Read more >>

by Danielle DeTiberus

The most unifying and (for many men at least) surprising aspect about the #MeToo movement was just how precisely the narratives mirrored one another. Women of all ages, ethnicities, and backgrounds were telling stories that could have been my own, could have been yours or your mother’s. There’s a sense of comfort in knowing that one’s experiences are shared— validation and empowerment in the sheer numbers of voices raised and bodies marching in the streets. Because the very bodies which make us vulnerable also bring us great strength. This juxtaposition seems to be at the heart of Emari DiGiorgio’s debut collection The Things a Body Might Become. The collection takes its title from the poem “Of All the Things a Body Might Become—“ which is indicative of the poet’s scope and style. It exists at once in the surreal and the banal, a space we all seem to be occupying as of late. The body becomes not “an anvil, a bottle of bleach [or] a basketball” but “a container, the/ kind you might receive at the holidays, filled with shortbread or caramel/ corn.” Read more >>

By Tom Griffen

The first image within A Story of America Goes Walking depicts a large black “X” speeding across two pages, it’s intersection folded in the center seam. A crimson field of woodcut flowers is marked out, negated, and the junction poses a visual contradiction that stops the read before it even starts. On the next page, in the early lines of the first (and title) poem, antagonistic imagery is highlighted by the poet’s use of enjambment: “a story of America hoisted itself out of a Massachusetts pond / and was surprised by endless meadowlands / of blacktop.” What follows is an allegorical response to Henry David Thoreau’s essay, Walking where America’s narrative is thus described: it is given independence, fed grandiosity, made into a celebrity, then dies after it, “poured its heart out to the earless asphalt.” Poet Saara Myrene Raappana dances words with Rebekah Wilkins-Pepiton’s striking images. Together their work represents an imbalance between Thoreau’s nature and the so-called modern advances made since his era. The collaboration shapes a response to contemporary America—and the result is as much beautiful as it is melancholic, if not maddening. Read more >>

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February 2018

by Molly Spencer

Two boys are practice-dancing shirtless / on the lawn. A bicycle is chained to a rack for bikes. // People fill the quad like they know what they’re doing. / One guy’s in the middle of it all with a video camera. // He’s turning in circles like a narrator. / I raise my hand and he raises his almost // like a flinch at first. He thinks he knows me. He doesn’t.” These are the first seven lines of Christian Anton Gerard’s latest collection, Holdfast (C&R Press, 2017). In dense, circuitous, always heartfelt, and often humorous poems that celebrate a wide-ranging poetic heritage, Gerard undertakes an unrelenting interrogation of self. In doing so, he creates both an experience of, and a defense of, making. He stakes a claim for the poem and the life forever under construction, and possibly for the poem as the life forever under construction: “I keep reading / all these poems about poems and poets / trying to become what I read….” Read more >>

by Hillery Stone

“If you marry, you will regret it,” Kierkegaard wrote in Either/Or in 1843. “If you do not marry, you will also regret it.” Yes, the quiet truth at the heart of our oldest institution: it isn’t easy. The speaker in Kimberly Grey’s first collection, The Opposite of Light, which won the 2015 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize in Poetry, takes us so close to her marriage that we can see its intricate, intimate structure, the architecture of its language and feeling. And it isn’t all light. “Love is not an actual helmet,” she writes. It can not shield us from the world, and the world is mostly difficult. Read more >>

by Liz Harmer

Maybe more so than other texts, Sylvia Plath’s Ariel is impossible to read outside of the biography of its author. Who can read Ariel away from her suicide, her poet-philanderer-husband, her children, her marital breakdown, that desk piled with papers, that kitchen, her body to find? The 2004 edition opens with a preface by her daughter Freida Hughes, who decries the use of Plath’s poems by “strangers” who “possessed and reshaped” them, making Ariel, “symbolic . . . of this possession of [her] mother and of the wider vilification of [her] father.” In her new and astounding collection, My Ariel, poet and critic Sina Queyras possesses and reshapes the poems of Ariel, but not in a way that tries to possess Plath or vilify Hughes. Instead Queyras revivifies them, combining elements of the lyric and confessional we associate with Plath with poems that demonstrate the biographer’s research, a kind of found poetry made from letters and criticism and fact. The total effect is to so defamiliarize the poems of Ariel as to give them new urgency, an urgency moves them from 1960s America to the preoccupations of our own time. Read more >>

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January 2018

by Astrid Alben

Sudeep Sen’s Fractals: New & Selected Poems |Translations 1980-2015 covers no less than thirty-five years of his work. With over three hundred poems and a selection of his translations, there’s mileage to cover. Helpfully, Fractals is divided into three sections: Newer Poems, Selected Earlier Poems and Translations. The newer and selected poems are divided into subsections arranged according to earlier publication. The scope of work on offer is impressive and a celebration of a complex and beautiful oeuvre. Fractals includes lyric, free verse, haiku, ekphrastic poems, elegies, sonnets, micro-fiction and prose/(poems) that read part travel-log, part diary-like entries. The poems explore illness, death, sex, love, religion, loneliness, and loss, and he has a particular fascination for terrain in its broadest sense: the topography of landscape, of cityscape, of skin, and of consciousness. Read more >>

by Amy Seifreid

Jenny Johnson’s debut book In Full Velvet is a stunning collection of formally composed poems. By adopting and pushing against poetic form, Johnson sustains a tension that expresses a wide emotional range, including joy, rage, desire, love and need for acceptance. The poems throughout this book explore how we think of the body, gender identity and the relationship between nature and love. In Full Velvet opens with “Dappled Things,” which references the first line of “Pied Beauty” written in 1877 by Gerard Manley Hopkins. Additionally, Johnson adopts a poetic form attributed to Hopkins. “Dappled Things” comprises eight curtal sonnets—a sestet followed by a quatrain and a final half-line. This modified sonnet form is used by both poets to celebrate the unconventional. Hopkins’s poem is often viewed as an apology, a literary defense of natural objects not typically considered to be beautiful. Johnson’s poem, too, serves as a type of literary defense of “all that’s still somehow / counter, original, spare, and strange,” including “the alien markings on my girlfriend’s cheek and how / they form a perfect triangle.” This is where Johnson moves in her own direction, using a nineteenth century form to celebrate, explore and defend the LGBTIQ community. Read more >>

by Daniel Casey

The best collaborations are seamless, done in tandem so that the work we experience is a genuine union, a synthesis of two aesthetic sensibilities. They also offer a space for dialogue, where the work of each artist enters into a conversation with the other, producing something that is wholly of the moment, yet lasting. In their partnered book, Alchemy for Cells and Other Beasts, the poetry of Maya Jewell Zeller blends with the watercolors of Carrie DeBacker in such a way as to sit snuggly on high quality end of the spectrum of collaboration. DeBacker’s responses to Jewell Zeller’s text are widely varied – at times dancing around the poetry, possessed with just a hint of its imagery, then becoming at turns less evocative and more provocative of the poem, while at other moments text and image form inviolate parts that together illuminate. Jewell Zeller and DeBacker have created a text centered on the body in the world (“Matter is a state of being, of existing/ in the cave of a consciousness...”), focusing specifically the female body. Read more >>

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December 2017

by Victoria Chang

I find the most challenging book reviews to write are the ones on books that are complex and ambitious. Gabrielle Calvocoressi’s third book of poems, Rocket Fantastic, is one of those books. So much is happening on so many levels in these poems that one could write about anything really. But capaciousness is a word that kept coming to mind when thinking about Calvocoressi’s book—in form, in subject matter, in voice, in spirit, and it’s one possible way to shape a stunning and intentionally shapeless book. At the beginning of Rocket Fantastic, a note to the reader tells us that the musical segno symbol (that looks like a fancy S with a slash through its middle and two dots on either side) “is used as a pronoun...when referring to the figure of the Bandleader.” The note goes on to explain that the segno “represents a confluence of genders in varying degrees, not either/or nor necessarily both in equal measure. It is simultaneously encompassing and fluctuation, pronounced by me with the intake of breath when a body is unlimited in its possibilities.” The Bandleader (through the segno) appears and disappears throughout the book and acts as kind of fluid thread that is at once linking and at once breaking things apart. Read more >>

by B.C.A. Belcastro

“Rooted in surrealism,” reads the note on Echavarren at the end of Donald Wellman’s translation, just as I had imagined it would. You don’t need it to tell you, Echavarren’s poems are more than happy to speak for themselves about everything out of the ordinary. The bilingual edition provides each poem twice, first in English and then in the native Spanish, as two separate versions within the same volume. In that sense, it is not literally bilingual—page by page, it’s either all English or all Spanish….Rather than decry what Wellman necessarily loses, this is worthy of celebration, the ability to find new forms through the play of language and its rules. Read more >>

by Adam Crittenden

You won’t often find a book jacket adorned with praise from Ocean Vuong, CA Conrad, and Rusty Morrison. With Claudia Cortese’s Wasp Queen, the praise is well-deserved. Released in 2016 by Black Lawrence Press, Wasp Queen gives readers a portrait of youth, pain, and strength all while presenting surreal and beautiful imagery. Vuong writes, “Wasp Queen possesses something permanent and searing at its core: the will to live, even thrive, despite the shackles of childhood, despite even oneself.” The “shackles of childhood” prove to be harsh and abusive in Cortese’s poetic universe, as well as divisive in terms of how female gender expectations bombard children and teenagers. Morrison writes, “Cortese graphically exposes and explores what it would mean if a young girl, brutalized by all that is considered allowable by the social norms of our debased culture, could actually speak her mind.” What Morrison is engaging with here is that Cortese’s universe is driven by a young girl named Lucy, and Lucy is vibrant and honest and strong. We see Lucy in every aspect of her childhood, and we are reminded of the pain so many face from parental abuse to childhood bullying. The patriarchy is unrelenting in its bombardment against Lucy, and with all of the pressures society forces onto her from weight to beauty to Polly Pocket to sexuality, Lucy shows the reader that this poetic universe stings without remorse. Read more >>

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November 2017

by Scott Wiggerman

Days before Mother’s Day, I began reading Hum of Our Blood, Madelyn Garner’s searing collection of poems centered around her son Bradley (“Brad”) Joseph Braverman, “a son cut off / at mid-blossom” by AIDS shortly before his thirty-fifth birthday. Like any gay man of a certain age, I know that Brad’s fate could just as well have been my own. I often thought about the special bond between mother and son during my mother’s recent holiday visit, and I know that my mother would have been there for me, just as Garner was there for Brad, had I not been one of the lucky ones. This bond between mother and son, “love’s umbilical cord,” as Garner puts it, pulses throughout this powerful and introspective book. Read more >>

by Molly Bendall

Several years ago an 800-year-old pot was found on a Native American reservation in Wisconsin. Inside the pot were seeds from a now-extinct squash plant. However, when the seeds were planted they yielded a large and vibrant squash. The poems in Nance Van Winckel’s Our Foreigner remind us, not only of bygone eras, but also of people and things that might lie dormant for a while only to be re-awakened into a newer and perhaps more “foreign” world. Van Winckel invokes the return home of Rip Van Winkle (reminiscent of her own name) in the poem “A Man Comes Down” and remarks, “And how odd you’ve come down still / dressed in the ratty furs you wore up.” She is interested in things like these “ratty furs” and other stuff of lives that may seem obsolete yet retain a sense of selfhood and relevance. The idea of Rip Van Winkle’s nostos (or homecoming) leads Van Winckel toward other sorts of reckonings with the past. Read more >>

by B.C.A. Belcastro

Plenty of poems have arguments, but few claim to present any sort of conclusion. Raymond Gibson’s Meridian carefully arranges its poems to present a kind of investigation, opening with an unfamiliar world that gradually resolves into a series of short, image-driven leads and finally closes with the stark assertions of his “Conclusion.” “Presence,” on the first page, opens with “you are not here / and neither am I / here is between us” as though it were a crime or an unnatural occurrence. The tension here drives readers onward as we trail Gibson in his attempts to make sense out of memories, emotions, happenings. We wind up here, in “Conclusion: “you won’t meet the end elsewhere it will be / something brought with you…” The chapbook is riven with opposition: “Presence” is the main attraction, a long poem broken into parts and woven between shorter pages that draw stark attention to length and continuity. As a word, “Meridian” is difficult to pin down, with numerous definitions and a long etymological history originating in French, but everywhere the term makes reference to a dividing line: where does Gibson draw his own meridian, and what does it divide? The book doesn’t give us a clear answer—mirroring Gibon’s investigation into the self, the reader is following a trail of clues as they seek the boundaries of a secret geography. Read more >>

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October 2017

by Amy Penne

No reader of Darwin’s masterworks The Origin of Species and The Voyage of the Beagle can fail to notice the poetic quality of his observant pen. During his travels from South America to Australia, Tahiti, New Zealand, and, of course, the Galapagos Islands, he meticulously recorded in his journal microscopic shifts in species, his eye looking beneath the surface for clues to the intricate connections between species and their habitat. In his this shouldn’t be beautiful but it was & it was all i had so i drew it, Keegan Lester, like Darwin, records the beauty of change and adaptation, poetically challenging readers to examine the exotic while focusing on the everyday tragic moments of human existence. The book is the poet’s first full-length collection, winner of Slope Editions’ 15th Annual Book prize, and has been described by Timothy Donnelly as “unapologetically cosmic in its scope.” Read more >>
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by S.D. Lichen

Seated next to me on a plane once, I met a man from New Zealand. As we chatted he mentioned that “When you get off the islands, you tend to stay away a long time.” Reading The Most Beautiful Cemetery in Chile, I thought of him. Living in our Northern Hemisphere-centric world where so many of the centers of cultural, economic, and political power reside, we can tend to overlook the sense of isolation that our more geographically far-flung and isolated brothers and sisters might feel. The poet Christian Formoso, whose epic poem, The Most Beautiful Cemetery in Chile, has now been translated into English by Terry Hermsen and Sydney Tammarine in a lovely bilingual edition from Green Fish Press, has grown up in one of those far-flung places, Punta Arenas, Chile, located near the tip of South America, on the Straits of Magellan, a city in distance that is much closer to Antarctica than it is to Santiago, the Chilean capital. Formoso’s is a book that revels in such isolation, in such vast distances from more populated outposts. Read more >>
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by Emily Alex

Helen DeWitt’s widely-acclaimed first novel, The Last Samurai, has recently joined the many important works which have received renewed attention thanks to a re-issue by New Directions. Originally published in 2000, this essential novel from the Berlin-based writer, literary critic and thinker presents a coming-of-age story that relies on a familiar narrative framework: that of a hero’s quest. However, the formal ingenuity with which DeWitt describes the moral, intellectual and psychological formation of its young protagonist is such that the work defies any reductive or generic classification. In fact, The Last Samurai is perhaps best described as nonconformist: DeWitt embraces intertextuality and non-standard formatting to an awesome degree, and the result is both singular and singularly articulate. As the author suggests in her Afterword to the 2016 edition, this is a text that is interested in exposing “the unknown capabilities of the reader.” Read more >>
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September 2017

by Sara Rauch

Ginger Ko’s new collection, Inherit, is, as the name professes, a gathering and rendering of inheritances. The poems comprise an intergenerational compilation of voices speaking to a multitude of experiences, thoughts, curses and blessings handed down over years and through bloodlines. This multiplicity of voices urges the speakers of the book toward an understanding of self, of history, though try as they may, full assimilation never quite arrives. In its place, by the final pages, looms an inevitable acceptance of discomfort and perhaps even a reluctant appreciation for the gifts the past bestows. The inheritances Ko speaks of are explicitly female, explicitly relational… Read more >>
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by Mark Pleiss

Scott Spanbauer’s The Grill is a translation of Adolfo Pardo’s La parrilla (1981), an unnerving depiction of state-sponsored terror in Chile during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990). Named after “the grill,” a torture device that uses electricity to force confessions from its victims, the story serves as a counter-narrative to the official discourses of the Pinochet regime by presenting an eye-witness account of the government’s tactics of intimidation, humiliation, and violence. The story is told from the point of view of an adolescent girl who is kidnapped, along with her brother, for her resistance to the Pinochet government and spends several days in a political prison. The two are subsequently beaten and tortured by the National Intelligence Center, a gestapo-like political police force responsible for an estimated 40,000 abductions, thousands of which resulted in torture, murder, and permanent disappearances. Read more >>
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by Lucien Darjuen Meadows

Growing up, my favorite part of going to the doctor was the Animalia panels circling each room. Sometimes, I would hide behind a marble pillar watching “Diabolical Dragons Devouring Dainty Delicacies,” smelling sulfur and sugar so deeply that when the doctor came in, I could not be more surprised. Those panels, thresholds between belief and imagination, tickled my sense of self. Donika Kelly’s debut collection Bestiary, chosen by Nikki Finney as the winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, is just as effective as those panels. Bestiary will transport you—and return you to your world made quite new—making you question categories you give to language, creatures, even yourself. “Refuse the old means of measurement,” Kelly commands in Bestiary’s opening line. As her book spirals out over 43 poems, all one page long save for the visceral 16-page sequence “How to be alone,” we are comforted and challenged by Bestiary’s multi-layered structure. Read more >>
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August 2017

by Amy Penne

A busy antique store is nestled less than two blocks from my house, attracting dozens of elderly visitors every day, especially on Sundays. People seeking antique tools, silver, teapots, remembered artifacts. But I walk over for the postcards. In front of the cash register, four boxes of densely packed postcards, arranged alphabetically, leave traces of memory and stories. They’re often priced in small grab-bag clumps: love-notes, break-ups, Easter greetings, sorrow and grief, lovers’ stories left behind as ephemera for the curious collector to discover. Postcards are a nineteenth-century invention. The first known cards, designed specifically as objects to be mailed, came from Europe, via England, Austria, and Hungary. Their popularity as souvenir items skyrocketed after the Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. As objets d’art, postcards have enchanted readers and collectors for more than a century. Jordi Alonso’s postcard collection of poems, The Lovers’ Phrasebook, illustrated with stunning pastel art by Phoebe Carter, tangles language, romance, and translation in a spiral-bound objet d’art that invites intimacy while simultaneously deconstructing what may seem at first glance to be simplistic images of everyday encounter: hummingbirds, orchids, morning hair, tea for two, sunlight in winter woods. Read more >>
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by Aaron Brame

In June of 1998, three white supremacists attacked 49-year-old James Byrd, Jr., chained him by his ankles to their pickup truck, and dragged him down a country road to his death. The men then abandoned the remains of Byrd’s body in front of an African-American church and went to a barbecue. This horrifying murder took place in the Big Thicket National Preserve, in a rural part of east Texas with a long history of Ku Klux Klan activity. Big Thicket is also the childhood home of poet Natalie Giarratano, the “landscape of my youth,” as she calls it, and it is the geographical heart of her powerful second collection of poetry, Big Thicket Blues (Sundress Publications, 2017). Giarratano begins her new collection with an eight-part poem about Byrd’s murder that undertakes a brutal self-examination of racist violence in her hometown. While Giarratano mourns the death of Byrd, noting how “three cocksures chained you to the back / of their pickup as though you were some old / leather shoe,” she also implicates herself and her family and her own history as part of the evil that led to Byrd’s death. Read more >>
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by Meg Eden

Jennifer Givhan’s Landscape with Headless Mama, winner of the Pleiades Press Editor’s Prize for poetry, is a haunting fairy tale of watching, desiring and obtaining motherhood. Givhan’s poems combine both the visceral with the otherworldly, the every day with the legendary. Her poems are as real as they are magical, as grounded as they are inventive. In Landscape, Givhan portrays motherhood as a surreal journey where definitions of life and body are subverted. Givhan begins Landscape with a quote from Audrey Niffeneggar: “In fairy tales it’s always the children who have the fine adventures. The mothers have to stay at home & wait...” However, Givhan transforms this trope and makes the mother the central figure to her fairy tales—who is not only an active participant in the story, but a vital guide for primary speaker in the poems, the daughter. The mama, the main mother figure in the poems, serves as both model and affirmer, passing down the inheritance of motherhood to the daughter. The fairy tale of motherhood starts with the foreshadowing of the mother’s death. In “Karaoke Night at the Asylum,” the mama is “already coffin-legged.” The speaker is already “a gravedigger.” We enter this fairy tale knowing and expecting death to come. Read more >>
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July 2017

by Tom Griffen

Joy Ladin’s eighth poetry collection, Fireworks in the Graveyard, is a testimonial of personal transformation. A stunning book tormented by fear and bodily discomfort, yet one also celebrating stalwart perseverance. Ladin’s personal experience with gender transition might be the book’s inspiration, but the work is poised for universal interpretation. The opening poem, “While You Were Away,” hurls readers into a moment which, as implied by the title, underwent some sort of change. It quickly becomes evident that this change was prolonged—an exacerbated feat of endurance—and marked with harrowing details: “The world / grew wider, warmer, more dangerous...Another ocean / deepened between us.” The poetic use of “us” is elusive, though there is a suggestion that it serves as an all-encompassing persona. Read more >>
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by David Armand

Jeffrey Alfier’s latest collection of poetry, Fugue for a Desert Mountain, takes the reader on a meditative, almost monastic, journey through the American Southwest—down Route 66 and its tributaries of highways and byways that snake through places like Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, California, and then just near the border into Mexico, where “Above the windbreak of a steep-walled / ravine, the castaway jacket of a border / crosser is arbored on mesquite thorns.” However, Alfier’s trained photographic eye goes beyond the obvious “buttes,” “switchbacks,” “cutbanks,” and “chaparral” that most readers might associate with this region. Instead, Alfier takes his reader to the darker places, ones that likely never appeared in an Ansel Adams photograph. Read more >>
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by Hannah Dow

Amelia Martens’s debut collection of prose poems, The Spoons in the Grass Are There to Dig a Moat (Sarabande, 2016) is a successful, surprising, and darkly humorous rumination on contemporary public, domestic, and divine life. The unassuming nature of the prose poem’s form, coupled with a childlike philosophy regarding life and death, effortlessly invite readers into the worlds this book creates. As it does so, Martens establishes herself not only as a serious prose poet, but as a prose poet with something new to offer the genre. The collection opens with an apology, or at least, a poem called “The Apology,” as if to assure her readers that this is indeed a poetry collection: And the apology I made for you came from a willow tree. From a lemon. From some mud I found in the living room. Our daughter thinks you are a giant. She asks you to lift the house, so she can put her dolls in timeout. There is a crack in the back of my mind and I am filling it up with forget-me-nots and sailor’s knots and do nots...Read more >>
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June 2017

by Jenna Le

Platypus Press is a U.K.-based literary press. At one end of the length spectrum, they publish a select catalog of full-size books; at the other end, they publish individual poems and prose works in their online literary magazine Wildness. In between these two extremes, they also traffic in an art form with which I was wholly unfamiliar before visiting their website: the “digital mini-chapbook.” Digital mini-chapbooks, so far as I can gather from Platypus’s website, are book-like entities that are only eight pages long (this page count includes their cover, front matter, and back matter). Platypus makes its digital mini-chapbooks available for free download from their website, in two forms: a standard .pdf that can be read off a computer screen and a differently formatted .pdf that is intended to be printed double-sided and then folded into a little booklet you can hold in your hands. The first of Platypus’s teaspoon-sized delicacies that I sampled was Ode to the Far Shore, a collection of five poems by Khaty Xiong, a Hmong American poet (Xiong’s full-length poetry collection Poor Anima, released by Apogee Press in 2016, was the first-ever full-length poetry book to be published by a Hmong American woman poet). Read more >>
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by Sara Rauch

Sofia Samatar’s new collection of stories, Tender, is comprised of two sections: “Tender Bodies” and “Tender Landscapes.” In a way, bodies are landscapes, the physical terrain upon which we map our emotional lives. But, bodies also exist separate from the landscape—forces at work upon each other, for better or worse. As one might intuit from this division/ connection, there is a lot of mirroring throughout Tender. The stories gathered here reflect the other side of something, or an alternate lens through which to view the world—something both of and other. Infused with dreamscapes, myth, and fairy tales, Tender is fabulous in all meanings of the word. The collection’s nineteen stories and standout novella span time and space, ranging from ancient history and myth to automatons and kings to post-apocalyptic and futuristic imaginings, and yet, Samatar’s themes of youth, desire, loss, and return connect the pieces with unexpected clarity. The stories resound off one another—a dream here, a longing there—and all the while, a steady creep of pain snakes between the lines. Read more >>
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by Sonja Johanson

Airea Matthews’ debut collection, Simulacra, is an experiment in time travel, a self-examination that takes place by means of a non-linear journey through civilization. Matthews employs a council of writers, philosophers, musicians, and mathematicians – along with a pantheon of deities spanning multiple cultures – to pull back the veil of the mundane and reveal personal truths. She dons a series of masks through which we can view this story, and ultimately takes them all off. The titular “simulacra” refers to French philosopher Jean Baudrillard’s concept that likeness uncovers the truth – the examined thing is, in fact, the thing itself. Matthews uses a changeable character to personify her simulacra. Sometimes it is “Rebel”, from the Camus epigraph that opens the book. Rebel warns us up front what we are in for; in the opening poem she reflects “...I knew it was a winged thing,/ a puncture, a black and wicked door.” Other times her simulacra is “Want”, who, when we first meet her, tells us “I see through you...Nothing to see. Not much to your kind.” The simulacra is perhaps best personified by Narcissus. Fascinated with his own reflection in both the literal and figurative senses, Narcissus frequently appears in a water motif. He invites us to “Imagine that you are sitting by that pond only to find that you are the water and you were very, very thirsty.” If Narcissus thirsts, for self-knowledge, for love, Matthews’ simulacra possesses an even more compelling urge – intense hunger. Read more >>
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May 2017

by Emari DiGiorgio

As much as Laura McCullough’s seventh book of poetry The Wild Night Dress, which was selected by Billy Collins as a finalist for the 2017 Miller Williams Poetry Prize, charts the union of science and poetry, it also is a profound meditation on hunger and loss. Throughout the collection, the need to be fed, literally and figuratively, and the speaker’s obligation to feed and sustain those around her is a recurring theme. These are poems of witness and survival, as the daily and mundane continue asking of the speaker, even when she has been stripped of those who sustained her most. A glance at the table of contents reveals seven poems referencing food, hunger, feeding, and part one titled “Passage with Hardboiled Egg” opens with the poem “Feed.” In this poem, after the lifeguard has cleared the waters, the husband remains on the wrack line–an image that returns throughout the book as a physical place where speaker sinks and metaphorically as the line of the marriage, of love itself, something that washes out and renews. Meanwhile, the speaker ventured into deeper water, joining those “throwing themselves/into the swallowing mouths//of the coming waves.” Read more >>
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by Bradley Sides

Elif Batuman’s absorbing and intellectually riveting The Idiot transports us back to the not-so-long-ago world of 1995. Times are certainly different. Nair is popular, all the cool kids walk around with Discmans, and email is just becoming a thing. America feels less cynical and self-obsessed. I know, I know. It’s been a while, but The Idiot makes us remember (and long for) those days. For Selin, the eighteen-year-old Turkish-American, at the heart of Batuman’s novel, the world is full of possibilities. She’s a recent high school graduate, and it’s time for her to enroll in college. So, she chooses Harvard. She’s unsure exactly what she wants for her future, but she thinks that college will help guide her. When registering for her classes, she, unsurprisingly, finds herself interested in many of the options. Like I said, she’s a hopeful protagonist. Eventually, she signs up for an introductory course to Russian, an English course “about the nineteenth-century novel and the city in Russia, England, and France,” a studio art class called “Constructed Worlds,” and Linguistics 101. She even auditions for the college orchestra. It doesn’t take long for Selin to become consumed by the arts. Read more >>
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by Victoria Chang

Before I open a book of poems, I always feel a sense of hope. Oftentimes that hope quickly deflates in the first few lines. Sometimes that hope comes in and out like a breeze. Very rarely, that hope turns to something akin to joy. Chen Chen’s debut book of poems, When I Grow Up I Want To Be A List Of Further Possibilities, published by BOA Editions, falls into that rare category—it’s a book that is miraculous in all its pain, trauma, and humor. At its core, Chen’s book tackles several themes such as migration, coming of age as a gay man, Asian American experience and identity, family love and disappointment, love and unrequited love, and more. But how originally and deftly Chen writes from these experiences is what ultimately makes his book so powerful. Specifically, Chen’s skillful use of repetition to mimic obsessive trauma, his surprising imagistic and sometimes surrealistic leaps, and his use of humor throughout, all work together to create a unique voice. Part of the power of Chen’s book is derived from the chanting repetition both within poems and threaded throughout the collection. Read more >>
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April 2017

by Sean Singer

Post—, is his fourth collection of poetry, and it’s a fascinating and wonderful book. At once oblique and aphoristic, it nonetheless addresses on some level our current and contemporary moment with serious insight. The poems have the function of all elegies: to lament, to praise, to console. What is most admirable about them is how they use a minimalist’s eye, bending tone and making the most of economy of language. Take, for example, the curious title Post—. It does a lot of work in placing the poems, especially in their domestic and even political contexts: to square, to attach or affix, to make known or announce, to station or place, and maybe most accurately, to come after or succeed. Some of the poems are titled “Post-Elegy,” and invoke a plane crash, a burned house, or a box of someone’s ashes. Memorializing, yet somehow prescient, the poems are for specific people and moments, yet will likely ring true for many sensitive readers. Read more >>
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by Bronwyn Mills

About four years ago, a spate of reviews and articles began to come out focused on the work of one Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky. Since then, at odd and sometimes aha! moments, someone has sidled up to me and asked in hushed mispronounced tones, almost whispering, Have you read Krzhizhanovsky?Who? Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky (1887 – 1950,) a Russian author of Polish descent lived and wrote in the 1920s in Moscow. Almost none of his work was published nor did he approach a publisher in his lifetime. In fact, it is a wonder that he has been discovered at all. He himself quipped he was a writer “known for being unknown.”) Several years ago, the Paris Review backgrounded Krzhizhanovsky’s work by noting that in 1939, Krzhizhanovsky, despite his restricted publication history, was nevertheless elected to the Writers’ Union—which meant that posthumously he was eligible for the process of “immortalization.” In 1953, Stalin died.... In 1957—the same year as Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago—a commission was set up to examine Krzhizhanovsky’s literary legacy. It lasted two years and was then disbanded, having drafted a publishing plan that was never implemented. Then, in 1976, Vadim Perelmuter, a poet, literary historian, and essayist, discovered Krzhizhanovsky’s archive. He had to wait until 1989 and the full thaw of perestroika before he could publish one of Krzhizhanovsky’s stories. Between 2001 and 2008, Perelmuter finally edited a handsome five-volume edition of Krzhizhanovsky’s works. Read more >>
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by Marcene Gandolfo

Elizabeth Colen’s What Weaponry, a novel in prose poems, examines the decline of a relationship. We glean a story through a rapid succession of cinematic scenes, but also, in the spaces from which each scene ends and the next begins. Whether we read this book for its storyline, or for its poetry, the book is, most pointedly, a study of human nature. The story’s conflict lies in the tension between desires for comfort, companionship, and stability and yearnings for freedom, self-gratification, and power. The book opens in the months following the death of the speaker’s parents, after he and his lover move to a seaside town. The first poem in the collection, “Low Clouds,” introduces us to the couple as they play with their dog at the beach. On the surface, in this pleasant setting, the couple appears full of promise and hope. However, this poem also introduces a number of ominous images, which foreshadow obstacles that occur later in the book. Read more >>
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March 2017

by Sonja Johanson

In her first full collection, Katherine Rauk takes us on a classic heroine’s journey, but with this warning – you may not find resolution, and if you do, it will be in the journey itself, which is tense, internal, and expansive. These poems borrow from a selection of archetypes and characters, both literary and historical, to examine the female experience, and they dismiss the upbeat societal narrative. Instead, they delve into women’s actual lived experiences to illuminate a truer storyline.Readers can intimate Rauk’s intent right from the cover. Her title is taken from the poem “The Clearing,” and the dichotomy of its words – “Buried Choir” – tells us that we are being invited to a world of voices that are both suppressed and uplifted. Fred Michel’s carefully selected cover art, “Papaver somniferum,” illuminates Rauk’s surface message of seasonality in the human condition. The skeletal seed heads are a Greek chorus, singing of the subterranean river that weaves its way through the book. The photo also hints at a deeper, more subversive message: knowledge is power, and it may be too dangerous for some readers. Papaver somnifeum is the infamous opium poppy. The flower makes an appearance midway through the book, with “faenas unfolding/in the black/bullrings of their eyes.” Balm for suffering, dangerous medicine, it is also a common garden annual. Read more >>
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by Nina Alvarez

Hybridity done in a certain fashion—immersed in telling while methodically subverting format, structure, intention—is a careful job. It is a one-person string quartet playing parts that must carry a different resonance, and yet harmonize. Memoir and analysis have blended artfully in recent collections like Appetites by Caroline Knapp and The Empathy Exams by Leslie Jamison. This has often felt exciting, rich, and appropriate: orientation and honesty, analysis and personal reflection married well. Joining the fold is Brian Blanchfield’s Proxies: Essays Near Knowing (Nightboat, 2016), winner of the 2016 Whiting Award in Nonfiction. Blanchfield’s North Carolinian laconic wit, pop-culture dissection, literary erudition, wry and transfixed storytelling, serve up an entertaining and edifying essay collection. How does Blanchfield, or any hybrid memoirist, pull out the quick and subtle threads that are most taut and most tender? It is no easy feat, but this author makes it look easy. With two books of poetry under his belt, Blanchfield crafts sentences significantly elevated by their narrative musicality and gymnastic precision. Read more >>
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by Brigitte Wallinger-Schorn

Maja Haderlap’s outstanding novel, Angel of Oblivion (2016), offers a tender exploration of identity in a community deeply influenced by the atrocities of World War II. Born in 1961 in Eisenkappel/Zelezna Kapla, Austria, Maja Haderlap is not yet well-known in the English-speaking world. Though Angel of Oblivion is her first work to be translated into English, Haderlap has published several volumes of poetry in both German and Slovenian. She often emphasizes that she does not feel located in either of these two worlds due to her bilingualism. Instead, she points out, she lives in one world made up of two languages. In Angel of Oblivion, Haderlap describes the childhood of a girl born to a poor Slovene family in the countryside of Carinthia, the Southernmost province of Austria. Little by little, she reveals conflicts within the family, which oftentimes result from the trauma of ethnic persecution by the National Socialist party. It is the unromanticized description of both the girl’s immense love for her family and origins and the disturbing past that absorbs and enchants the reader.Read more >>
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February 2017

by Sara Rauch

I confess I don’t read nearly enough translation, despite long-standing knowledge of how insular Americans’ reading habits are, and a long-standing desire to be, well, unlike a typical American. Part of the problem (which is, of course, entirely mine) is that translations can be hard to come by, rarely finding their way onto the Fiction & Literature shelf, and they can be somewhat, shall we say, inaccessible. In regards to the latter, it is intriguing to discover how much more avant-garde, or experimental, international literature is, to dive into prose that disregards standard American-English rules about plot, character development, linearity, and storytelling. But the biggest obstacle, I find, when I do crack open a translated book, is confronting the lack of knowledge around other cultures’ histories and social mores. As Americans, it can be easy to take for granted our own ways of being, assuming everyone lives like us—reading translated fiction from any nation proves this is definitely not the case. I spent a lot of time ruminating on my American shortcomings as I read The Return of Munchausen, a Russian novel penned in the 1920s by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, recently published in a beautifully translated edition by New York Review of Books Classics. Despite his output, only a handful of Krzhizhanovsky’s stories were published during his lifetime. Brought back into the cultural conversation during perestroika, the political movement for reformation of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union that took hold in the 1980s, Krzhizhanovsky has recently been recognized as one of Russia’s great 20th-century writers. Read more >>
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by Siham Karami

“American poets now usually do not seek to weave a comprehensive vision,” proclaims Mark Edmundson in his essay “Poetry Slam,” (Harper’s, July 2013). One may argue against this view, but how many have provided a Blakean-style vision in counterpoint? Coming from outside of the usual academic milieu, R. Nemo Hill, in his newest poetry collection, In No Man’s Ear, astonishes with irrepressibly visionary poetry, transforming apparent banalities into extraordinary worlds, giving the mundane details of contemporary life a greater context, charged with unexpected meaning. Visionary poetry must have both far-reaching scope and a touch of the cosmic; newness or originality alone is insufficient. Hill takes us there by revealing connections under the radar and marrying opposites: the mundane becomes sublime, the inaudible becomes transformative music, the lowliest act, such as sweeping, takes on cosmic significance. Hill’s first book was “an illustrated novel … organized according to the processes of medieval alchemy.” The word “alchemy” resonated as an apt metaphor for and key to these poems, which perform their own verbal transmutation of worldly observation, beautifully rendered, into transcendence—from lyric poetry to visionary epic. Read more >>
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By Okla Elliott

Poetic and religious impulses have been sibling undertakings since prehistory, and most of the major religious texts are either partially or completely composed in verse. One need merely to consider the Bhagavad-Gita, the Edda, the Hebrew Scriptures, the New Testament, the Quran, Hesiod’s Works and Days, and much devotional poetry in these and other traditions to get an idea of how intimately related poetry and religion are. And as Ewan Fernie writes in his scholarly (yet accessible) introduction, such prominent figures from twentieth and twenty-first century philosophy as Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, and Slavoj Žižek have variously taken up theological perspectives in their analyses of world events and theoretical concepts. Couple that with the rise of religious groups around the world and the fact that there are several hundred poems included in The Poet’s Quest for God, and there can be no doubt that the relationship between and importance of religious thought and poetic production are not merely a thing of ancient history. Read more >>
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January 2017

by Aaron Brame

House of Water, the debut collection by poet Matthew Nienow, is an important and moving accomplishment, a song of praise to familial love and a fervent, nearly religious tribute to the transformative power of work. Nienow is a builder of boats—he trained for a year at the Northwest School of Wooden Boatbuilding–and his poetry is at its best in the woodshop, with its chisels and clamps, its cedar strakes and ball-peen hammers, the “holy geometry of the try square and perfectly sharpened pencil.” The language in these poems is quiet and concrete, and its emotional focus is minutely, almost obsessively, centered on the process of constructing vessels from raw wood. As he fashions a bowsprit from a piece of lumber, he describes how “the boat / curls golden bracelets of cedar / around your wrists as you plane each / plank.” Nienow is not interested with the coy ambiguity or self-indulgence of many of his contemporaries, but rather returns to what Ezra Pound might consider the “luminous details” of the boat-builder and his tools. Read more >>
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by Elizabeth Hoover

Pantone is a New Jersey-based design company responsible for standardizing color reproduction. Their color chip system ensures that “Coke Red” and “Minion Yellow” are consistent across marketing and products. Each year, Pantone picks a “Color of the Year,” which, according to their website, is a “color snapshot of what we see taking place in our culture.” It is wishful thinking that a single color can represent our tumultuous time. Tellingly, Pantone picked two colors for 2016. However in naming the “Color of the Year,” Pantone recognizes that color packs a significant symbolic punch—emotional and cultural. Poet and artist Shayla Lawson explores the significance of color in Pantone, a chapbook consisting of 20 poems printed on unbound cards slipped into a colorful envelope. Each poem is titled with Pantone color code. (Pantone colors are labeled with a descriptive name and an alphanumeric code.) Shorter poems are printed on white cards with the color chip on the back and poems that need both sides of the card are framed by their color. Because the poems are printed on cards longer than they are wide, readers can spread the poems out like the iconic Pantone fan guide, a book of color strips pinned together at one corner. Read more >>
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by Katherine Hoerth

Upon opening The Magic of the Mariachi La Magia del Mariachi, you’ll first notice a pastel portrait of a young woman playing a violin, her face at once serene and serious. Underneath, a dedication reads: “...to all mariachi musicians … whose music transcends all boundaries.” This collection of ekphrastic poetry, too, transcends boundaries of language, of culture, and of art itself. As a collaborative project by a husband and wife team, poet Steven Schneider and artist Reefka Schneider have created a vital and timely book that celebrates the romance of Mariachi music while exploring the history and socio-political significance of this form of expression. The book consists of twenty-four portraits of Mariachi musicians and accompanying poems, both in English and their Spanish translation by Edna Ochoa, in forms ranging from sestina to villanelle. Each page is filled with the magic and the allure of this musical form that originated in Mexico and today has become internationally beloved, particularly in the United States. Read more >>
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December 2016

by Marcene Gandolfo

In her stellar debut collection, Prayer Book of the Anxious, Josephine Yu includes poems that illustrate faith in human empathy and community. As the title suggests, Yu’s poems read like prayers. They derive rhythms, syntax, and language from the Roman Catholic missal, the incantations of Sunday mass. In a sense, they remain Catholic in their generous universality and attention to ritual. Yet the poems resist traditional religious readings. Yu’s poems celebrate the holiness in human imperfection and the need for connection. Read more >>
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by Tom Griffen

Tyehimba Jess’s second book, Olio, is a book without rules, blues on the page. It weaves new and reimagined facts with poetry, prose, and biographies of first-generation freed slaves who performed in minstrel shows. A spellbinding and lyrical melange of verse, Olio resembles its namesake—a minstrel show’s hodgepodge variety act that later evolved into Vaudeville, “the heart of American show business.” In Olio, Jess examines the transition from plantation slavery to a less overt servitude where, marked as entertainers, overburdened black women and men mock themselves and their people for the audience’s merriment. The word minstrel is derived from the Latin minus meaning “lesser.” The Oxford English Dictionary defines minstrel as “servant.” Read more >>
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by Paul A. Christiansen

In many ways, Matthew Olzmann’s Contradictions in the Design exists as an outlier amongst current American poetry books. It’s concerned with politics but not consumed by them, considers the self without becoming solipsistic, uses humor but avoids glibness, embraces linearity and directness instead of fragmentation and ambiguities of language, all while eschewing a narrative arc or project-based cohesiveness. The poems in Olzmann’s sophomore collection thrill the reader with straightforward insights regarding the natural and human world thanks to their humor, diversity of topics, startling metaphors and profound observations. As the partially blurred image of Michelangelo’s David on the cover suggests, the distortionary effects of time are amongst Olzmann’s many fascinations. Read more >>
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November 2016

Castles and Islands by Joshua Edwards

by Christopher Kempf

Like Elizabeth Bishop, whose legacy he takes up, Joshua Edwards is a poet of travel; I am not the first to make the comparison nor, I imagine, will I be the last. Yet if that term—“poet of travel” or, worse, “travel poet”—seems tinged with the middlebrow, more reminiscent of Eat, Pray, Love than Italo Calvino, it is because invoking it as a kind of summative description means, in the case of both writers, mistaking subject matter for intellectual content, for ideas; to call either writer, that is, a “poet of travel” is to miss how, for both Bishop and Edwards, travel serves in large part as a heuristic, what Richard Hugo would call a “triggering subject” by which to pursue broader questions about the self and its relation to world. These are questions—“What is death?” Edwards actually asks, a line that would seem maudlin from a less-skilled writer—that have long been the domain of philosophy, of course, but which were once, too, in a more serious era, the province of poetry as well; in Castles and Islands, Edwards returns us to that era. Though he departs from Bishop in significant ways, as I will show, Edwards continues her effort to move outward from individual experience to rigorous intellectual inquiry, muscular thinking that a younger generation of American poets seems largely to have abandoned. Read more >>
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The Haunting Glow: On Eowyn Ivey’s To the Bright Edge of the World

by Bradley Sides

It is the brave who conquer life’s many frontiers. The physical and emotional boundaries that enclose us keep the weary from reaching the majestic worlds that aren’t, in truth, that far away. Eowyn Ivey’s To The Bright Edge of the World, set largely along the Wolverine River Valley in the untamed and wondrous Alaskan wilderness, shows how courage can lead to a world of awe. For Colonel Allen Forrester, the frontier he wishes to tackle is tangible. It’s 1855, and he’s on an expedition with a small group of explorers across Alaska. As his great-nephew says of Colonel Forrester’s trek in a present-day exchange with a museum curator, it was “surely the Alaska equivalent of Lewis and Clark’s.” Ivey’s quick allusion does its job. We see that Colonel Forrester is, indeed, a forger—someone determined to set out and to conquer. We learn of Colonel Forrester’s journey by various journal entries, letters, news-clippings, drawings, and photographs. Read more >>
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by Lisa Cheby

In the midst of found poems made from Trump speeches, divisions in the literary community over Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize in Literature, and interviews with voters in swing states on the NPR morning news series “A Nation Divided,” I read Sarah Blake’s Mr. West, a poetic chronicle of her researching the life of Kanye West. This year has ruptured our culture, leaving societal gaps between various groups so large that many wonder if they can ever be bridged. In such a landscape, Blake’s study of West offers a map in how commonalities may be found across the oceans of differences that make others seem untouchable and unreachable, whether due to celebrity, race, gender, class, or geography. Incorporating news feeds, Tweets, and conversations with her husband about her research, Blake’s poetry excavates a deep (and perhaps unexpected) affinity with West and his mother and challenges her audience to let these poems – poems that blend juxtaposition, multi-voiced lyricism, and pop culture – dissolve the barriers between this pregnant Jewish woman, this hip hop music star, and the reader. Read more >>
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October 2016

by Douglas Ray

Ocean Vuong’s stunning debut collection Night Sky With Exit Wounds meditates on belonging and exile, fathers and sons, the body of language and the language of the body, violence and desire. And while these topics may be familiar areas for the poet to explore, Vuong’s poems defamiliarize the familiar, inviting the reader to discover what it’s like to navigate relentless newness. His poems are events: beautifully sad, violently sexy, and politically poignant. Take the familiar topos of the body—something that we all “know,” but also the source of constant mystery and discovery. Vuong begins his book with a poem that invokes liminality, betweeness—“Threshold”—that itself begins with the body: “In the body, where everything has a price, / I was a beggar.” The body here welcomes commerce, desire, risk, reward—all concerns of later poems. In “Immigrant Haibun,” the speaker wonders, “Maybe the body is the only question an answer can’t extinguish,” and we realize that the known world gives us access to the persistent unknown. Then, in “Headfirst,” the body is violence: “the body is a blade that sharpens / by cutting.” Read more >>
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by Hannah Star Rogers

Max Ritvo’s poetry moves from strength to strength: that of knowing image; of a vivid metaphor returned to in new ways again and again; of sharp, wise humor; and of the aside, to speak honestly to the reader. Ritvo’s short career left us the world he deftly articulated in his work. This world included poems in The New Yorker and POETRY, and a sampler in Boston Review, as well as prose and interviews in Huffington Post, Divedapper, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. It’s difficult to experience these poems without knowing that Ritvo is no longer here to read them. He passed away at the age of twenty-five in August of this year; he had lived with cancer since age sixteen. Ritvo made his illness the subject of his work, but managed to explore life and the lives around him, rather than death. Indeed, Ritvo’s poetry breathes life into all kinds of people: his speaker’s mother, his therapist, his wife, and his ex-girlfriends, who (according to “When I Criticize You, I am Just Trying to Criticize the Universe”) apparently live in the bathroom. These lives intertwine with those of Ritvo’s speaker, calling attention to role of the poetic imagination in a relationship. Read more >>
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by Lois P. Jones

Narnia author C.S. Lewis said “If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world.” Great writers are capable of creating that world. That Studdard was able to merge myth and ecstatic language with contemporary poetics in her first full poetry collection, I Ate the Cosmos for Breakfast, is evidence of her ability to birth universes at will. Studdard’s opening poem, “Creation Myth,” places us directly between Creation’s legs. “So there God lay, with her legs splayed, / birthing this screaming world // from her red velvet cleft, her thighs cut holy with love / for all things, both big and small, // that crept from her womb like an army / of ants on a sugar-coated thoroughfare.” These first lines embody not only a truth of our visceral beginnings; they break tradition with male-dominated monotheistic dogma. Greek myth offers a direct connection to the female concept of creationism. Eurynome was the Goddess of All Things, and desired to make order out of Chaos. By making love to the North Wind, she birthed Eros, god of Love, also known as Protagonus, the “firstborn.” Read more >>
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September 2016

by Susan Scarlata

From the first sentence of The Sorrow Proper (“The library may close…”), impending ends begin to accrue. Truly, “impending” is the simplest way to encapsulate this circuitous, ethereal and captivating novel. Lindsey Drager’s first, this is a thoroughly satisfying book that delves artfully into the underside of human lives. The characters in the book that Drager designates with proper names are a group of female librarians working toward their obsolescence as the library shifts away from carrying books. This group of women regularly meets for drinks after work, sessions that are an incomplete salve for the impending loss of the institution their lives revolve around. At one such session the women talk about what they have lost, and a terrible accident they were witness to comes-up. “I don’t know what it is I lost, [Avis] says, but something happened after the Bronson girl. I can’t put my finger on exactly what it is...but I feel it fully gone. Grief without an axis, Harriet says. That’s the worst kind.” Here, and throughout this novel, Drager brings clarity to aspects of human existence beneath the everyday. Avis is recollecting about an accident that had little to do with her directly, but somehow created loss for her. She tries to ascertain what she lost but cannot figure it out beyond knowing that something is fully gone. Read more >>
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by Hannah Star Rogers

Kathleen Ossip’s first book The Search Engine (winner of the 2002 Honickman Prize) and her second, The Cold War (2011), shared her original mind and fresh language combinations with readers. Ossip’s third book, The Do -Over (Sarabande Books, 2015), brings her into conversation with one the oldest forms of poetry: the elegy. In this new collection, she poses a pair of questions that animate her poetic inquiry about death. “How do you stay in heaven?” Ossip asks, “Is it a kind of sophisticated rewind?” Ossip’s song of grief depicts dying in the abstract and in the specific. Ossip’s point of entry into the particular, indeed her organizing principle, is her grief for Andrea Ossip, her husband’s stepmother…Generally speaking, an elegy is a remembrance for the beloved, which often consists of a lament, orienting the reader to the speaker’s loss, while also denying the loss by rendering the beloved in words. That is, before finally coming to rest in the comfort of the aesthetic creation which itself becomes a substitution for the lost. To fill that role in this case, the poems must be funny, observant, and kind–and Ossip delivers. Read more >>
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by Carlo Matos

Gabriel Blackwell describes Madeleine E, a project he began as a personal rumination on Hitchcock’s Vertigo, as “a kind of critic’s notebook, an assemblage, a commonplace book, but also an homage and an acknowledgement”…Like Vertigo, each retelling or reframing of Madeleine E. leads always to deeper mystery rather than to clarity and resolution. It is a book that does not develop in any traditional sense but estranges. It is a work that seems to be in the midst of revision, as if it isn’t quite finished, as if it can never be finished. Sometimes revision is an act of cutting and compression; sometimes it is an act of expansion or rearranging, but then there are those works of art that grow only as you become increasingly estranged from them. The more Blackwell doubles and trebles his themes, his narratives, his allusions, the farther he gets from the narrative voice(s), the more we enjoy the experience. It’s as if he wanted to recreate the vertigo of Vertigo (in himself, in the reader) rather than simply explain it, describe it, or critique it. Read more >>
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August 2016

by Tom Griffen

The collection’s first poem is a call to attention. A tolling. “Belle,” and its homophonic first line, “The heart is a bell,” set the stage. The grandmother has fallen ill, tapped for death: “Push / the sternum and hear the church / doors crack.” This line is followed by a desperate cry to God—a complex yearning intertwined with regret, shame, and a sort of indescribable mourning. A belated begging for prayerful help. Habitual, though unpracticed, requests are made to God: “Parishioners sludge in / The pulled tongue sounds.” This sludge. Slow, thick, and overwhelming. Vulnerability is the poet’s pure response. Readers bear witness to Jackson’s personal ceremony—but nothing is definitive, nothing is explained. Instead, she uses gesture and imagery to do the work. In “Home-Going,” she writes, “Spectators tangled in your drawn net ++++++ surround / your hammock ++++++ salt and map your body: // repast.” The metaphor of a spider catching its prey conveys a natural brilliance, a web of interconnectedness, patience and perfect design. But such understanding of nature does nothing to relieve pain. Within this collision of desire (for life) and necessity (for death), there is desperate hunger for a body because it is leaving. Read more >>
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by Kristina Marie Darling

Elaine Scarry once noted that there are “many errors made about beauty.” We tend to forget that it is not an innately embodied quality, the kind of faultlessness that could be described as fact. Any statement about beauty is a willfully made thing, a gathering of the images, memories, and texts that circulate within a shared cultural imagination. Throughout her magnificent body of work, Donna Stonecipher invokes a familiar literary landscape littered with the darkened ruins of romanticism. Each poem appears as a luminous assemblage of received tropes, which have been made to reflect on the ethical problems inherent in their own making. Indeed, the “roses,” “mirrors,” and “blooming domes” that populate Stonecipher’s poetry subtly call attention to their own artifice, “wondering” at our “easy ability to abstract suffering into the picturesque.” Even more importantly, Stonecipher reminds us that our ideas about aesthetic pleasure are inseparable from the economies in which they circulate. One witnesses the transcendent moment made commodity. As the “swans,” “gems,” “white butterflies,” and “flowers” begin to accumulate, the speakers of these intricately crafted poems mourn the possibility of pure wonder in a global marketplace. Read more >>
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by Emma Bolden

Seth Landman’s poetry is not perfect. It’s digressive and recursive, rambling and at times even ranting. It feels raw, unedited, and more like a draft than most contemporary poetry – which is exactly why it is important. There is little argument that over the past two decades, the writing, reading, and study of poetry has been systemized due to the increase in MFA programs and the academic reliance on the workshop model. Many also argue that just as the word “workshop” implies the manufacture of commodities for sale, the workshop model has commoditized poetry itself, resulting in the so-called “workshop poem.” …Seth Landman’s work is far from workshop-perfect, as it follows few formulaic instructions…Landman’s work shines light on a very important fact: by following the right formula, a poem may be friendly, clean, and concise – in other words, perfect – but perfection is far from human. To borrow from an oft-quoted Leonard Cohen song, “There is a crack in everything / That’s how the light gets in.” In cracking apart the workshop’s formula, Landman creates poems that are unmistakably, beautifully human. Read more >>

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July 2016

by Katherine Hoerth

Goodbye Mexico: Poems of Remembrance is, at its heart, a series of poems of love for the nation and lament for the loss of fluidity of the U.S-Mexican border. This border, once porous and easy to cross both ways, is now a site of political turmoil, violence, and danger. Written by numerous, talented poets with various relationships to the nation of Mexico, this collection offers a vast array of perspectives on a country that’s at once beautiful and ugly, filled with wealth and poverty, peaceful and ravaged with violence. Goodbye, Mexico: Poems of Remembrance is an expertly curated anthology that both celebrates and mourns this rapidly changing, vibrant nation. Many poems in the collection paint an image of an idolized Mexico – an exotic landscape that’s sensual, beautiful, and alluring. These poems are reminiscent of a first love. Read more >>
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by Bruce Sager

Torque. The tendency of a force to rotate an object about an axis, fulcrum, or pivot. Just as a force is a push or a pull, a torque can be thought of as a twist to an object. Oh, she torques everything, this poet. Takes the slightest notion and applies the slant force of her refined perception until that concept’s twisted into the sudden, the astonishing. The new. And then there’s the voice, the syntax foregoing expected articles and growing forceful with clipped descriptors: “Cooing. Pigeons. Moscow hotel. The dream. / I am waking up in my green room to the cooing / of doves in the crabapple tree and the scent / of hot cocoa topped with froth of egg whites / Sunday breakfast treat of my Polish childhood. / It’s the day of the giant whale. The whale, / talk of the land-locked town. Blue circus tent, / people pushing alongside something huge, dark.” A barrage of concision, lists of things presented without affectation, things piled on things piled on things until an impression is born of itself, almost immaculately…” Read more >>
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June 2016

by Emma Bolden

To read u&i, Cassandra Smith’s frustratingly gorgeous and gorgeously frustrating full-length collection of poetry, is to be immersed in an experience that changes you. I began reading for answers; by the end of the collection, I gained not answers but a deeper appreciation of questions themselves. u&i is the perfect example of a work of art that takes full advantage of the traditions, freedoms, and limitations of the medium – a fact that is of little surprise, as Smith herself is a visual artist whose work in collage and bookmaking elegantly stretches the boundaries of what can be considered static and kinetic art. In u&i, Smith presents a cycle of prose poems that move recursively through meanings and meditations on identity. This is largely achieved through Smith’s master manipulation of one of the most intriguing facets not just of poetry but of language itself: the slippery nature of pronouns. In his essay “The Lyric: Problems of Definition,” Werner Wolf explores the complex and oft-confounding nature of pronouns – namely “I” and “you” – in lyric poetry. Wolf suggests that the lyric voice, long been perceived by readers, theorists, and critics as monologic, is more reflective of dialogue and multiplicity. In other words, the “I” and “you” in a lyric poem, to paraphrase Whitman, is contradictory, is large, and contains multitudes. Read more >>
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by Erik Noonan

A native of Aleppo who grew up in Benghazi and relocated to Milan, the Maronite and opera-lover Basili Shafik Khouzam carried a copy of Time Regained everywhere he went and wrote a university thesis on Alberto Moravia (the author of The Conformist). Under the pen name Alessandro Spina, he published The Confines of the Shadow, a chronicle of Italy’s colonization of Libya, three volumes comprising seven novels and four short story collections that took him twenty-six years to complete, from 1971 to 1997. In these books, Spina created a fictional space where Italians and Libyans met in the imagination, within “the confines of the shadow” of colonialism, whose “dark days, afflicted by a collective anguish,” cast a pall over every aspect of life. Subtitled “The Colonial Conquest,” this installment is the first to appear, with the next two, “The Colonial Era” and “Independence,” slated for release in 2016 and 2017. After the Fascist disaster had played itself out in Italy, Italian artists began making images of imperialism’s most insidious agent, the neoliberal, who appears in Confines’ first section, set in 1912. Read more >>
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by Anne Champion

“The scorpion/ is her sigil. Her love song on the battlefield,/ her war-cry in the senseless fields. Survive/ on nothing, on one insect a year. Dagger/ your tail.” These lines from the first poem in Latest Volcano, winner of the Marsh Hawk Press 2015 Poetry Prize, set the foundation for the philosophy of the entire book. The image of the scorpion, surrounded by devastation, surviving on little substance, lashing out until the only thing it has to strike is itself, becomes a metaphor for grief in this world—a world fraught with war and violence, whose destruction can’t be healed when even human connection, love, and sex are acts that end in personal loss and brutality as well. The collection bears witness to the topics that have mattered most throughout history—love, sex, and war—with relentless pursuance and razor-sharp intensity. Read more>>
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May 2016

by Sean Singer

The Little Edges is a large-format book that contains what Moten calls “shaped prose,” which according to the jacket flap, are “a way of arranging prose in rhythmic blocks, or sometimes shards, in the interest of audio-visual patterning. Shaped prose is a form that works the ‘little edges’ of lyric and discourse, and radiates out into the space between them.” I prefer to read them more simply as poems, and as the poems spin across the blank space of the pages, they wrangle that space into fresh meaning, taking by force the reader’s focus; the poems push through their attention to their subjects—for example, Ralph Lemon’s political and geographic dances, Jaki Byard’s bebop stride, or the idea of authority and ignoring authority, as represented by a subway shutdown in 1969. In the way so much of hearing jazz is visual, the poems in The Little Edges use the book’s big format to their advantage; the lines shove across the white space in a nearly physical way and demand you reconcile the audio information with the visual information. Read more >>

by Kristina Marie Darling

More often than not, we envision a moment of transcendence as pure wonder, what John Dewey described as a moving “beyond” mundane experience, an “intentional arrow” indicating something grand just beyond our reach. Yet this fixation on what is majestic fails to acknowledge a rich tradition of Romantic poetry in which beauty and suffering are inextricably linked. Throughout the work of Keats, Shelley, and many of their contemporaries, these rare glimpses of the sublime are frightening, even devastating, in the desire they instill for the ineffable, the unattainable, and the ethereal. We wish for the world to inspire in us a sense of awe, only to cleave straight through with a strange longing, the ice along the trellis already ravaged by light. Two recent collections of poetry engage the tension, conflict, and ambivalence inherent in our experience of beauty, reminding us that aesthetic appreciation is more complex than simple joy or astonishment. Gillian Conoley’s The Plot Genie and Brian Teare’s The Empty Form Goes All The Way To Heaven each present us with a different vision of the dark sublime, offering divergent possibilities for conceptualizing the kind of experience that exists at the interstices of the wondrous and the unspeakable. Read more >>

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April 2016

by Sean Singer

Laura Mullen’s Complicated Grief is one of the rare books that shows what it’s like to know another person by her thinking, and to get to a kind of clarity we, readers, rarely see. It has moments of beauty, even as it alienates the impatient part of the audience, and it astounds with its rigor and generosity of paying attention. Mullen uses the versatile and liminal form of the block-like collage prose-poem; neither essay nor memoir nor poem, but a bit of each, these non-fiction, non-poems push the fragment to become fully-formed statements. They also allow disparate voices to interrupt or coalesce and show the motions of the mind. Beautiful and troubling, Complicated Grief shows us what we may have experienced, but don’t yet know: that all losses trigger all previous losses. Read more >>

by Christopher Kondrich

LABOR, Jill Magi’s book-length poetic excavation of our oppressive economic landscape, begins with an index. It begins with what is usually last, with what only a specialized few would be interested in. With LABOR, Magi, it seems, is interested in illuminating what only those who flip to the index, who are paying close attention, see—the persistent and unyielding subjugation of the working class (women and people of color, in particular) not only by wealthy, powerful people, but also by a system that subjugates this working class by proxy. And, as with any index, a specific, predetermined structure presides, a structure of alphabetization and sub-alphabetization according to topics and their associations. “Work, / as cultural expression,” LABOR begins, “days as unit of, / distinction between, and hobby.” As this opening poem continues, we recognize the logically categorized and alphabetized arrangement of phrases, but we also come to understand it as a depiction of our oppressive economic landscape as well as how classification, how discourse itself is structurally problematic. Read more >>

by Lynarra Featherly

In Incorrect Merciful Impulses, Camille Rankine reaches for her reader with her generous range of poetic forms and her capacity to activate and modulate a series of internal-scapes both varied and honest. In this, Rankine leaves her reader in the midst/mist of a sharable and deeply moving poetic experience that feels personal even as it conjures incarceration and rising sea levels…By dwelling on Rankine’s generosity of form, I hope to articulate what I take to be her interest in leaving behind (or aside) poetry that strives to be the great-obscurator between poet and reader, poem as opaque and indecipherable sphinx; instead, Rankine seeks to offer poetry that is open, honest and multiplicitous in its communications and affectations. If a certain kind of calling-out has political legs, the calling-in of Rankine’s poetry conjures much more, an entire stage filled with and shared among various actors and the possibilities in otherwise-figured leading roles. Read more >>

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March 2016

by Emma Bolden

In her 2011 book The Art of Cruelty, Maggie Nelson raises Kafka’s famous question: “‘If the book we are reading doesn’t shake us awake like a blow on the skull, why bother reading it in the first place?’” In The Argonauts, Nelson delivers that blow on the skull. I turned to The Art of Cruelty as a lens through which I read The Argonauts – or, more specifically, a lens through which I read my reading of The Argonauts. I found myself circling in particular around Nelson’s comment about Pope.L’s work: “I like it, though, because it bothers me, and I’m not sure why.” I will confess that The Argonauts bothered me. I will also confess that I was very much bothered by the fact that The Argonauts bothered me. However, this discomfort is, I think, so crucial to the reading of the text that it is built into the text itself. The Argonauts insists upon the obliteration of the boundaries, be they social, psychological, political, biological, or familial, in and between our bodies and our lives. Read more >>

by Kristina Marie Darling

All too often, writers approach the lyric “I” as a singular entity, a shimmering manifestation of the individual and his or her beliefs about the world. Such an attitude, perhaps unwittingly, reinforces a dangerous set of assumptions about the boundaries between self and other. Consciousness no longer appears as the product of dialogue, made and unmade by one’s interactions within a community, but rather, we observe at a distance. This visible separation between subject and object in so much of lyric poetry, and within our own thinking, limits what is attainable when considering literature as a vehicle for social justice. By setting the individual apart from the collective, we foreclose any possibility of holding ourselves accountable for a ubiquitous and at times destructive cultural imagination.With that said, Joshua Clover’s work is a rare exception to this disconcerting trend in contemporary lyric poetry. He offers a vision of the self as essentially relational, implicating the individual as they participate in the machinery of language, dissemination, and censorship. Through his provocative appropriation of a decidedly academic lexicon, and the vocabulary of continental theory, he asks us to consider the ways that freedom and disenfranchisement often exist simultaneously. Read more >>

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February 2016

by Virginia Konchan

Tyler Mills’ resonant and resinous—the very quality of the reed instrument and lyre—debut collection Tongue Lyre contains sympathies beyond metaphor, past logic, into prima facie proof of poetry as both neo-epic narrative and song. In an era when the written archive is dangerously close to being usurped by the digital cloud, the evacuation of the subject isn’t merely a political or even aesthetic problem. Mills shows us that myth, the text, and the subject’s interiors, are “larger than life”: reflecting a world of mirrors and surfaces, themselves ghostly traces of the real. Read more >>

by Erik Noonan

Truth Game is the most understated of Clark’s late work, but that’s not to say that a peaceful easy feeling is embracing him. Actually, any serenity you find in his writing after about 1980 would be your own. A reversal takes place between the calm of his books published by BlazeVox (five from 2010 to date, alongside his blog, Beyond the Pale) and the contrarianism of a middle-period run of nine books published by Black Sparrow Press from 1984 to 2000. The late work starts with Light and Shade: New and Selected Poems (2006), published shortly before the New College of California closed its doors, where Clark taught for twenty years as a core faculty member in the Graduate Poetics program. Light and Shade shows him using the Selected Poems as a form, cutting, revising and retitling his work in a way that recalls W.H. Auden, since Clark’s New and Selected is an interpretation that changes the meanings of the poems and the contours of the oeuvre. At the time of publication, for those of us who’d been following his work, Light and Shade opened the way to a new period—one that reaches a milestone now with Truth Game. Here the poet lets his urbanity and suavity take the lead as he hasn’t done since the early days—except in Truth Game, there aren’t any jokes. Clark is a lot more serious now. The humor of old is nowhere to be seen in the blog where these poems first appeared, yet his moral conviction is in evidence online and in the printed poems. Large ethical concerns multiply and proliferate. And for this writer, the ethics of a poem aren’t confined within the poem’s content (its rhetoric)—instead they emerge from the poem’s relationships to the English language. Ethos is prosody. Read more >>

by Kristina Marie Darling

Joanna Howard’s innovative hybrid collection, Foreign Correspondent, has often been described as an engagement with Alfred Hitchcock’s film by the same name. Readers will discover, however, that the book is much more, offering incisive discussions of collaborative practice, the postmodern self, and the nature of conscious experience. Presented as a correspondence via post between girl reporter Johnnie and Scooter, a professional cage fighter, the book often reads as a dialogue between parts of the self or parts of consciousness. Indeed, the hybrid pieces in Foreign Correspondent suggest that it is through the process of engaging with voices and texts other than one’s own that the self is made strange, that we are allowed to experience oneself as another. With that in mind, Howard offers readers a perfect matching of style and content, in which the epistolary form compliments, and complicates, the narrative itself. Read more >>

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January 2016

by Hannah Star Rogers

Emily Dickinson’s The Gorgeous Nothings offers an incredible inquiry into the material practice of Emily Dickinson’s poetry and an argument for why we should take not just the visual culture of poetry into account, as so many new editions of Dickinson’s poetry do, but also the materiality—as both constraint and possibility. The Gorgeous Nothings, from Christine Burgin/New Directions, edited by Marta Werner and Jen Bervin with a preface by Susan Howe, is the first publication of Emily Dickinson’s complete envelope writings in facsimile from her visually-oriented manuscripts, rendered here in full color and arranged as if they were pressed into a scrapbook. The book is no doubt the dream of poetry and visual culture scholars (very literally as it took Werner, a Dickinson scholar, and Bervin, a visual artist, to bring the book together), but beyond important academic contributions, this book is a lot of fun to open and toss through as though it was a box of Grandmother’s letters—if your grandmother was the Belle of Amherst. Read more >>

by Derrick Austin

Second Empire is an astounding symphonic arrangement. Richie Hofmann’s Beatrice Hawley Award-winning debut is arranged in four movements, each section led by a “Sea Interlude.” The interludes (drawn from Benjamin Britten’s opera Peter Grimes) establish the tempo and tone from the delicacy of Dawn, to Passacaglia’s wit and quickness, Storm’s emotional reckonings, and concluding with Moonlight’s glittering, tender denouement. Despite the orchestral trappings, I fondly think of Second Empire as gorgeous chamber music, poems whose bracing intimacy belies a vivacity and subtle, structural integrity. These are impressive formal poems. Hofmann honors those stateliest of forms, the rhyming couplet and sonnet, with a freer music that remind me of Henri Cole’s experiments with free verse sonnets in collections like Middle Earth and Touch. Read more >>

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December 2015

by Anne Champion

“I am the fable with a mouth” — This line from “Ballad for Kissing Beneath the Tawdry Fireworks” encapsulates the magic of Hala Alyan’s second poetry collection, Four Cities. Haunting yet hopeful, musical yet desolate, nostalgic yet grieving—this collection gracefully interrogates themes like love and war. In these poems, the personal and the political weave together to form deeply felt poems that simultaneously put readers in a trancelike reverie while also waking them up to the horrors of the world. These poems touch the wounds of places like Gaza, Ramallah, and Baghdad, while also exploring love and desire in places like Paris and New York City. Alyan’s ability to do both of these things at once is part of what makes the collection so awe inspiring. Despite the collection looking fearlessly at topics like war and occupation, the poems radiate a sense of hope through lines that are almost like prayer. Read more >>

by Kristina Marie Darling

All too often, the small presses that populate the contemporary cultural landscape remind us just how insular many literary communities are. This proliferation of editors who support writers with very specialized interests and a somewhat obscure aesthetic seems intricately linked to the rise of social media networks and D.I.Y. publishing technology. Those who serve as cultural gatekeepers may now curate their newsfeed, conversations, and their overall experience of the world around them. Indeed, it is easier than ever to avoid challenges to one’s own views, predilections, and assumptions about literature. Yet there are more books than ever, aimed at progressively smaller audiences. The various networks of cultural producers grow increasingly fragmented, with less and less dialogue between artistic communities. Cleveland State University Press, and the books published by its remarkable Poetry Center, are a rare exception to this disconcerting trend in contemporary literature. Three recent titles in particular place diverse and often very different artistic traditions in dialogue with one another, envisioning poetry as a rhetorical space where disparate cultures, mediums, and historical milieu can exist side by side. Lee Upton’s Bottle the Bottles the Bottles the Bottles, Broc Rossell’s Festival, and Arseny Tarkovksy’s I Burned at the Feast, newly translated by Philip Metres and Dimitri Psurtsev, each initiate provocative dialogues between literary and artistic communities in a way that is altogether refreshing. Read more >>

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November 2015

by Kayla Rae Whitaker

In 2014, Octopus Books published an anthology of work by poet Wong May, whose 1969 collection, A Bad Girl’s Book of Animals was the subject of the Portland press’s Recovery Project series article. A late 1960s graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop, May published two more books, Reports (1972) and Superstitions (1978), before taking a 36-year hiatus from publishing further work. The result of this three-decade interim period is the substantial and engrossing Picasso’s Tears: Poems 1978 – 2013. At turns tender and wrenching, May’s collection is most striking in its compulsive readability. This is a rare trait in poetry so intensely involved. So close is her eye to her subjects, so intricate the lines, the details, that the reader is tugged in on a line-by-line level. One cannot help but to succumb to close reading. Yet the reader will find in May’s collection a sweet momentum that drives from page to page, so crucial in that it allows the reader to see the world from the poem’s eye. While May’s gutsy experiments with style and form could risk isolating the nervous reader, the tactics found in these poems instead challenge us, inviting us to dig further, to consider shape and sound as much as language. Read More >>

by Erik Noonan

With the sophistication of its dialectical movement, the gravitas of its ethical appeal, and the mercy of its psychological rigor, Claudia Rankine’s Citizen combines traditional poetic strains in a new way and passes them on to the reader with replenished vitality. The subject matter is explicit, yet the writing possesses a self-containment, whether in verse or in prose. Neither consistent with genre conventions nor independent of them, this book stands out among recent offerings in poetry, art and scholarship. Rankine’s assessment of the writing of Juliana Spahr might revealingly be applied to her own as well. In an interview with Poets.org, Rankine writes of Spahr that she admires “her vision – sort of the politics of her work, the connectedness that she advocates in her critical work and that is demonstrated in her creative work[.]” Whatever may be said about an individual poet’s vision, vision itself is a unity of endeavor. When we ask what qualities Rankine has advocated in her own critical work, and how Citizen might be said to demonstrate them – when we ask what her vision is, in other words – the following statement from the same interview seems a fitting reply: “I don’t feel any commitment to any external idea of the truth. I feel like the making of the thing is the truth, will make its own truth.” For Claudia Rankine, truth is an aesthetic that implies or contains ethics – in short, it is beauty. The poet’s truth consists in the execution of a work of art. Read more >>

by Kristina Marie Darling

What happens when the space between words is no longer enough to maintain a semblance of order? In G.C. Waldrep’s Testament, the various hierarchies that we have imposed upon language are jostled, interrogated, and fundamentally challenged. As the text unfolds, lessons in etymology appear alongside “a little math,” “presidential elections,” and “the idea of god.” We are presented with luminous fragments, gathered from works of contemporary poetry, the margins of Maurice Blanchot’s The Writing of the Disaster, and the pages of Scottish newspapers. By allowing these vastly different lexicons to coexist within the same rhetorical space, Waldrep calls our attention to the arbitrary nature of the categories we use to organize language, suggesting instead that phrases culled from seemingly unrelated discourses can strike sparks against one another. Structured as a long poem in the tradition of Eliot, Pound, and H.D., the form makes possible a unified presentation of the many textures of language that the project encompasses. Waldrep’s choice of form orients the reader as an archive is unlocked, pillaged, and reconstituted. In doing so, he shows us that each poem (that is, every skillful poem) is a miniature act of deconstruction, a response to not only other cultural texts, but the rules of language itself. Read more >>

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October 2015

by Julie Marie Wade

Let’s start with the subjunctive: If I were in charge of party favors at the Oscars and the Golden Globes, I’d make sure every actor and director—every lover of movies and every maker of them—went home with a copy of Jon Thompson’s Landscape with Light. I’d tuck this book beneath every seat, beside every dinner plate. I’d ask the ushers to pass out copies at the door. Landscape with Light marries the literary sophistication of a consummate poet with the emotional investment of a devoted cinemaphile. The result is a collection of poems that both exceeds the basic meaning of ekphrasis (from the Greek for “description,” as in a work of art that describes another in some detail) and expands the definition to include “probe,” “rumination,” and “riff” as well as “epistle” and “homage.” Thompson ensures that no familiar viewer of these 54 classic and contemporary films, ranging from Birth of a Nation and The Wizard of Oz to Training Day, Fargo, and Grey Gardens, will ever encounter them the same way again. Read more >>

by Kristina Marie Darling

Recent years have seen an ever-increasing preoccupation with the ownership of literary texts, a desire to claim everything from lived experience to pieces of language and literary forms. One might argue that this proprietary approach to writing may be linked to an artistic tradition that has for so long privileged a definition of the lyric that allows for only a single speaker, who is charged with portraying shared experience without another voice to strike sparks against. As a result, the “I” is almost always made to claim what is communal as his or her own. This very individualistic approach to the lyric, and its prevalence within contemporary literary circles, has fostered a culture that values the articulation of one’s own ideas over simply listening, a single voice over dialogue and conversation, and ownership over rewarding artistic exchange. With that said, three recent books of collaborative poetry remind us that, as Marianne Moore rightly argued, poetry is not just speech, but rather, an attempt to listen and respond. Carol Guess and Daniela Olszewska’s How to Feel Confident with Your Special Talents, Traci Brimhall and Brynn Saito’s Bright Power, Dark Peace, and Noah Eli Gordon, Noah Saterstrom, and Joshua Marie Wilkinson’s Figures for a Darkroom Voice each offer a lyric “I” that is at once plural and singular, that proactively blurs the boundaries between self and other, subject and object, viewer and viewed. They offer a vision of the self that is essentially relational, a self that is inextricable from the other. Read More>>

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September 2015

by Susan Scarlata

Elizabeth Arnold’s Life is a collection of light, bold, contemporary paeans to natural cycles and incidents involved with living. Arnold’s scope for and definition of “natural” in no way limits that word to being only “of the earth.” Instead, it expands out so that all observations, all happenings, from natural disasters to the use of DDT and from the effects of ice storms to that of a fourteen-wheeler’s on the highway fit within the natural world. In the poem “Like Water Flowing,” Arnold works through geologic time across space and continents and makes the text both universally expansive and personal. Read more >>

by Lynarra Featherly

Ewa Chrusciel’s new book of poetry, contraband of hoopoe, asks its readers to do the work of not just reason or the sensuous but to engage their sensuous reason. Chrusciel is asking us to not only conceptualize or make real her vivid imagery in our mind’s eye, but to feel the bones and feathers of the hoopoe move against our skin—cross barriers—as reading becomes experience. In the movements between approbation and interrogation, we are left unsteady—opened up between thinking and feeling. Through new openings, or crevices, loosened moments, Chrusciel’s work makes its way past our major affective and cognitive registers: beyond approval or disapproval, beyond desire or disgust, we find it impossible to be either “for or against” what contraband elicits. We are rather suddenly “with” contraband, possessed, our boundaries having been crossed unnoticed. Performing its themes, the work of the smuggler is operative here, and our life as an either/or “border agent” is disarmed. Read more >>

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August 2015

by Paul A. Christiansen

Gazing into the outside world often affords one a closer view of the self. In his essay collection, Loitering, accomplished fiction author Charles D’Ambrosio reveals aspects of his painful personal and family history by placing himself in diverse surroundings and experiences. True to its title, Loitering collects the contemplations of a man lingering in foreign rooms, on street corners and between the pages of books, but rather than inviting examinations of what’s in front of him, the environments act as catalysts for investigations of his own relationship with suicide, mental illness, and the type of isolation a life of observation brings. Read more >>

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July 2015

by Farrah Field

When art and pain collide, a perfectly complicated and beautiful book sometimes emerges. Such is Julia Cohen’s I WAS NOT BORN, her third and latest work. It is a lifetime achievement and commingles poetry, transcripts of therapy sessions, letters, meditations, and text messages (all of which are poetry really) with a tremendous psychological and emotional impact. Cohen writes, “Children who sneak into the jewelry drawer. Are the children who pretend to be parents. Now imagine language.” This single line outlines entirely what is encountered in the oeuvre of her work: childhood, memory, and poetry writing. She writes into the growing distance from childhood, nurturing the wilderness of its memories, and honors the time when the self was being created unawares. Her poetic approach is sacred, all-encompassing. She depicts language as a sort of omnipresent being, a kind of god, and although I WAS NOT BORN very much addresses the heartbreaking challenges of a period in her life, it is very much a book about poetry and reading and writing. Cohen’s poems and meditative paragraphs are rhythmically savvy and organically lyrical and she maneuvers between these and therapy sessions. Poetry as ligaments. Read more >>

by Hannah Star Rogers

Gregory Pardlo’s second book of poetry, Digest, asks us what it is to have a father, to be a father, what kind of parenthood a country has and where ideas are born. His methods include satirical syllabi (particularly poignant is “ Ghost in the Machine: Synergy and the Dialogic System”), retellings of the same utterances with new meanings, and interlocking narratives (as in “Four Improvisations on Ursa Corregidora” and “Alienation Effects”), and groupings of poems (including “Marginalia,” “The Conatus Improvisations,” and “The Clinamen Improvisations”), which produce resonance for subjects like violence, family stories, and the complications of memory. From his “dad-pants” to passing references to his “newly pregnant wife,” Pardlo will not let us forget that he is a father and that no one knows exactly what this means. Read more >>

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June 2015

by Virginia Konchan

The intergenre poetic text Ohio Railroads, by C.S. Giscombe, is a long poem in essay form split into two parts; first, a topographical “map” of the post-slavery North and second, a lyric poem. Both dreamscapes are interpersed by elements of memoir, rooted in the author’s memory of a dream in which one of his parents died and the other, in response, sent forward a warning in the persona of the departed one. The exact nature of this work brings to mind the genres in which memoir, specifically grief memoirs, backlight another, more historical or textual project. Blink and you’ll miss it; whistle while you work, categorize and “map,” while you mourn, and the dagger-cut and heart-rending loss, as specific as, say, place, the socio-emotional geography of the heart, will lessen, or fade away? The details that make a beloved beloved, in life, and memorty—the grain, as Barthes says, of their voice—set in bas relief to the abstraction of geography, and history, as recounted in narrative, rather than place. Read more >>

by Kristina Marie Darling

All too often, contemporary works of fiction explore autobiographical subject matter with precision and wit, yet fail to extend meaning beyond the individual who’s telling the story. The unsuspecting reader is forced to inhabit someone else’s psyche, then they are ushered out into the cold. With that said, four recent titles from Dorothy: A Publishing Project are a rare exception. Nell Zink’s The Wallcreeper, Renee Gladman’s Ana PatovaCrosses a Bridge, Amina Cain’s Creature, and Suzanne Scanlon’s Promising Young Women address intensely personal issues—including social anxiety, depression, and schizophrenia—while at the same time constructing larger arguments about the artificial boundaries we have imagined between self and world. Read more >>

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May 2015

by Corinna McClanahan Schroeder

The Name Museum, Nick McRae’s first full-length collection of poems and winner of C&R Press’s De Novo Poetry Prize, begins with an epigraph from Psalm 49, in which the psalmist points to the folly of those men whose “inward thought is, that their houses shall continue for ever, and their dwelling places to all generations,” who “call their lands after their own names.” So begins The Name Museum’s investigation of home, religion, and mortality, of naming and heredity. In this collection, the poet seeks both to place his own voice within the context of tradition and history and to honor the voices around him as he moves through such seemingly disparate landscapes as the Georgia foothills and Eastern Europe. Written in sonnets and villanelles, in blank verse and free verse (and with a chant royal thrown in for good measure), these are carefully crafted poems made of equal parts devotion, remembrance, and imagination. They are also poems suffused with both earnestness and honesty: here is a poet with a song, and it is our privilege to listen. Read more >>

by Carlo Matos

André Alexis’s Fifteen Dogs is an apologue that brings to mind Animal Farm but where the central concern is metaphysical rather than political—though there is some overlap. In it, a random group of dogs are given human intelligence as a result of a wager between the gods, Apollo and Hermes. Apollo bets Hermes that human intelligence will make the dogs even more miserable than it makes humans. As playful as this conceit is, I found myself wondering what the book would have been like without the divine frame. It occurred to me that the novel would work just as well if the dogs had simply become aware one day in a manner as mysterious and banal as, say, a Jose Saramago novel, where suddenly no one can die or everyone is stricken blind. Since the domestic canine has lived in close proximity to humans for anywhere between 16,000 and 32,000 years, it might have been interesting to suggest that maybe this coexistence was somehow responsible for the leap towards a more human way of perceiving the world. The framing device, however, doesn’t take away from the fun, nor does it hamper the philosophical underpinnings of the novel. Read more >>

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April 2015

by Clifford Endres

Gülten Akın has long been honored as one of Turkey’s leading poets, but English translations of her work are scarce. All the more reason then to welcome What Have You Carried Over?, which offers translations of work selected from twelve of her books published between 1956 and 2007—a sixty-year stretch that witnessed some of the most serious traumas of modern Turkish history, including three military coups. Akın and her family were not spared. “For eight years I waited at the gates of a prison,” she remarked at a 2006 session of the Cunda Workshop for Translators of Turkish Literature. It was her son she was waiting for. Arrested in 1978 when he was a university student, he was held for eight years without a conviction. Poems of 42 Days emerges from the poet’s experience of that large fact—“We were mothers, witnesses to the sufferings of our sons and daughters. The hand raised against them came down on us too”—as it zeroes in on a particular event: a hunger strike by the young political prisoners. Read more >>

by Jonathan Russell Clark

If someone had the gumption to go around and ask everyday Americans to name a poem, nearly all of them would certainly supply an answer. One might hear, as a reply, Poe’s “The Raven” or Hughes’s “A Dream Deferred” or Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” (though this last may be mistakenly referred to as “The Road Less Travelled”). But if this same pollster were to ask these citizens to name a single volume of poetry, a collection, how many would be able to come up with a title? It’s easy to imagine that, with the exception of books named after a single poem (e.g., Eliot’s The Waste Land or Ginsberg’s Howl), many would remain silent here. Yet, as we know, poets spend a great amount of time organizing their collections, meticulously arranging poems in a particular order to communicate a particular arc or narrative with their book. But we’ve been taught to celebrate individual poems, not collections, which means that there is a whole category of creative expression being largely ignored. This is a shame because one of the great potential joys of a poetry collection is the way in which poems speak to each other and even rely on each other, the way these connections can transcend the power of single poem. Read more >>

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March 2015

by Sandra Marchetti

“The Dottery,” perhaps best read as, ‘daughter-y,’ is a kind of finishing or boarding school for female children about to be born. This finishing school focuses on interactions between “mutters” and “dotters,” and the central question of what it means to become a gendered female. ‘Where does gender come from?’ ‘How is it constructed?’ and ‘Who decides?’ are central questions in Kirsten Kaschock’s The Dottery, winner of the 2013 Donald Hall Prize in Poetry. The book emphasizes how our contemporary society marginalizes female power, femininity, and feminism. The word “woman” isn’t even uttered until Page 33; only homophones and nicknames that ‘skirt’ the label are employed beforehand. Kaschock proffers the idea that the female is somehow always for sale in contemporary culture. The personal—sexuality and lifestyle choices—become commercial in this volume, a “concentric cap and trade.” Women are also bought and sold through marriage, and the suppression of women’s needs and desires is a consistent motif in Kaschock’s scathing social commentary. Read more >>

by Kristina Marie Darling

What’s perhaps most exciting about Sidebrow Books, a small press publisher based in Portland, Oregon, is the editors’ commitment to expanding our sense of what is possible within a hybrid text. Much of their innovative and thought-provoking catalogue exists at the interstices of poetry and prose, text and image, book and art object. Five recent titles in particular present the book as an interdisciplinary space, calling our attention to the myriad ways that texts can be as visually engaging as they are attentive to the intricacies of language. Read more >>

January 2015

by Carlo Matos

Oliver de la Paz’s fourth book of poetry consists of a series of epistolary poems addressed to a fallen and therefore absent empire, which (interestingly) makes these poems a species of apostrophe as well. “Dear Empire,” the ambiguous speaker writes, “These are your ashes. We’ve carried them for years in baskets, urns, boxes, and lockets.” The first line of each poem catalogues one characteristic or trait of the empire. De la Paz considers it a work of taxonomy, but I think a more apt analogy would be that of the post mortem. The empire is upon the table and its parts are being recorded in alphabetical order in a sort of coroner’s report: “divided into rows . . . arranged alphabetically, so as not to lose track of them.” Read more >>

by Kristina Marie Darling

Joanna Ruocco’s brilliant new novel, Dan, begins by presenting the reader with an impossibility: “If only there weren’t leap years, thought Melba. Every 365 days, the calendar would lose several hours and, by now, there wouldn’t be any days left at all.” This somewhat unsettling observation captures the spirit of the book with wit and precision. As the narrative unfolds, Ruocco presents us with a world which, much like the celestial orbits described in the opening scene, appears familiar. Yet the small hamlet of Dan, and the stars that govern its days and nights, prove to be rife with contradictions and paradoxes. Readers will encounter a world that is inherently unstable, despite its close resemblance to our own. Read More >>

by Anne Champion

Seam by Tarfia Faizullah, winner of the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award, may be my favorite book of 2014. I picked it up after returning from a peace delegation to Palestine, and I was experiencing a range of emotions that witnessing brutality and listening to stories of survivors evoked within me, but I found myself utterly mute in terms of articulating it. Then I read Seam: a collection that weaves beauty and devastation tightly together, carefully and respectfully chronicling traumatic memory in a way that reaffirms hope, humanity, and community. Read More >>